Peter J. Kalis (‘72 BA)
Peter J. Kalis is chairman and global managing partner of K&L Gates – a firm with more than 1,400 lawyers working in 22 cities on three continents. After law school, Mr. Kalis served as law clerk to the late J. Skelly Wright, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and for the late Associate Justice Byron R. White of the United States Supreme Court. He has been selected by his peers for inclusion in The World’s Leading Insurance and Reinsurance Lawyers, The Best Lawyers in America, and Law Dragon Magazine’s “500 Leading Lawyers in America” and “500 Leading Litigators in America.”
Mr. Kalis is a member of the American Law Institute. He has served on task forces of the American Bar Association, and routinely addresses professional congregations on both practice and law firm leadership topics.
He served as the ABA’s National Law Day Chair and served ex officio on the ABA’s Commission on Civic Education and Separation of Powers and the Standing Committee on Public Education.
Mr. Kalis provides strategic advice to many of the nation’s largest corporations. He has worked extensively with chief executive officers, boards of directors, and general counsel in the development and execution of proactive or defensive litigation strategies and strategies to preserve and access corporate insurance programs in response to a variety of novel and substantial claims.
He serves on the boards of directors of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and National Pancreas Foundation. He served on the executive committee of the board of directors and chaired the finance and investment committee of the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute. He is a past director of the Duquesne Club, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, The Children’s Center of Pittsburgh, Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestras, and National Kidney Foundation of Western Pennsylvania.
A native of Wheeling, W.Va., Mr. Kalis received a bachelor’s degree from WVU in 1972. While a student at WVU, he served as student body president and was elected Phi Beta Kappa. In 1971, he was named WVU’s 17th Rhodes Scholar. He attended the University of Oxford where received a doctor of philosophy in politics in 1976. He continued his education at Yale Law School, serving as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, and received his law degree in 1978.
Mr. Kalis has published more than 50 articles in professional journals and academic law reviews on a variety of subjects, and he is an author of Policyholder’s Guide to the Law of Insurance Coverage (with T. Reiter & J. Segerdahl), an editor of Tobacco Litigation and Insurance, and served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Insurance Coverage, a quarterly publication of Aspen Law & Business.
