Melissa Kalka once imagined herself in a white dentist’s coat, peering into mouths across bicuspids and middle molars.
Instead, from the top floors at Weir’s Plaza in Dallas, she examines balance and term sheets, drilling into multibillion‑dollar deals for hidden risk and opportunity. A transactional partner at the richest law firm in the world, she has become one of the firm’s go‑to architects for complex, capital‑intensive energy and infrastructure transactions.
Her client list at Kirkland & Ellis is elite; her portfolio eclectic. Kalka moves seamlessly from oil and gas, power and utilities, and Gulf Coast LNG export facilities to software development, financial services and even entertainment. Increasingly, though, much of her work converges on a red‑hot piece of the market: data centers and the infrastructure needed to feed artificial intelligence.
The past few months illustrate the pace and scale of Kalka’s practice. In January, she helped sell an interest in the Rio Grande LNG facility. In February, she worked on a marine maintenance and repair investment platform while also guiding a $3.8 billion private‑debt offering for a data‑center company. By April, she was advising a $1.2 trillion private equity firm on its investment in a U.K. asset manager, all while leading a Kirkland team counseling a four‑party investor consortium on the $33.7 billion purchase of AES, a utility and power company in Virginia.
But what truly sets Kalka apart is her experience in data‑center development deals, a specialty that has become one of the most coveted practices in the world as AI drives a ravenous demand for digital infrastructure to support it.
Kirkland colleagues have been known to claim her as the “Queen of Data Centers.” But her boss, Andy Calder, who leads Kirkland’s global transactional practice from Houston, thinks her influence already extends beyond law firm or gender.
“It’s been really fun to see her become arguably the leading digital infrastructure lawyer in the country,” Calder says.
In many ways, Kalka’s M&A experience parallels the growth in data center development. Her data center deals were among the first deals logged in the Corporate Deal Tracker, The Texas Lawbook’s database of reported corporate transactions.
Since 2022, she has advised on at least 14 data center deals totaling more than $100 billion for clients like BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners and KKR-owned CyrusOne.
Royalty and dentistry aside, Kalka is making her mark.
Melissa Dawn Kalka was born in Dallas in 1983. Like her two siblings before her, she graduated from Bishop Lynch, a Catholic high school in East Dallas, where her father had for years organized the school’s annual golf tournament.
Her early attraction to dentistry had nothing to do with teeth. A close friend’s father, a dentist, was the coach for their basketball team. Another friend’s father was an oral surgeon. She was impressed by their verve.
“They seemed to be pretty active and engaged and seemed to enjoy what they did,” as Kalka explains it in retrospect. Though both her parents were involved in business, young Kalka was certain she didn’t want to be.
“It turns out I was drastically wrong,” she says with a wry smile.
While a student at Texas A&M, she spent 60 hours at a local clinic in College Station. The experience helped conclude her dentistry career.
“I remember calling up my mom and saying ‘I hate this. I don’t want to do it.’ I got into business classes, and I loved it. I got straight-A’s and I never looked back.”
Having graduated from A&M, she took a job at American National Bank, where she cranked out underwriting reports, risk profiles and syndication packages for commercial real estate. When she began to weary of stress-testing numbers on Excel spreadsheets, she found herself imagining a new path.
Her mother had worked for 30 years for her uncle’s title company in East Texas. She overheard them discussing the need to hire a lawyer to help them on the real estate side of the business. She was struck by the possibility of going to law school.
She took the LSAT in December 2007 and was accepted at SMU at approximately the same moment that the investment bank Bear Stearns collapsed under the weight of the 2008 housing scandal.
“Terrible timing,” Kalka said. “Absolutely terrible timing.”
She was only two years out of school and scared, with a mortgage in Lake Highlands and life insurance. “I was a grownup,” she recalls.
She called her father, hoping for help. He reminded her of a family rule: one child, one parent-paid degree.
“I understand now that he was telling me to bet on myself,” she says.
She registered for the evening program at SMU’s Dedman Law School, working full-time during the day and studying at night. But the Great Recession kept deepening the odds against her wager-on-self.
She recalls that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008, a Monday —exactly one week after her law school tuition became non-refundable.
“I went to school from 6 to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday. I remember getting home and just sitting in my car and crying, thinking: What did I do? Am I even going to have a job?”
Doubling down, she left American National Bank for an internship at Jones Day. And when she graduated from Dedman in 2012, with a choice between Weil and Jones Day, she chose Jones Day, she says, because of Scott Cohen.
She recalls a recruiting lunch with Cohen during which she asked for the best way to approach an M&A practice.
“He said, ‘Come to Jones Day. Sit next door to me. I’ll teach you how to do this and invest in you. You put in the work, you show up, you work hard, you try to learn. I’ll teach you.’ And he lived up to that.”
Cohen, now a partner at Egan Nelson, doesn’t recall the lunch specifically, but he recalls her seamless instinct for assembling deals.
“I gave her plenty of rope, and she would she basically could run a deal even when she was a young lawyer,” he said. “She could pretty much do it all early on.”
Determination was part of the package. Like dentistry and banking, she learned from her experiences. And she was willing to take chances to be where she thought she needed to be.
“My mom working with her brother at the title company. I could tell she loved it. She was passionate about it, and I wanted to be able to feel that same excitement of enjoying what I do,” said Kalka.
“My family is very important to me, keeping me grounded and to remind me that no matter how much success you have, you always have to remember your roots. My grandfather always said, and it’s something that I’m always remembering: ‘You’ve gotta work hard; not take it for granted. It could go away any day. And when your back’s against the wall, that’s when you show your character.’ “
It started with learning what she didn’t want, but not without testing it. Early in law school she took a three-week leave-of-absence from her banking job to test the litigation path at the Dallas Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
“I really did not want to be a litigator because of what was going on around me, and I loved Judge (Elizabeth) Lang-Miers. She was wonderful. But I hated it. I hated the case law research. I felt like there was a needle in a haystack that I was never going to find.”
And when she left banking to become a summer associate, she was asked if she would consider litigation. She was ready with her answer:
“I was like, ‘I went to law school to be a transactional lawyer. That’s what I want to do. And if that takes me of your list of potential summer associates, then so be it, I guess.’”
Each time she was challenged she continued to double-down.
“I had already gone into debt, starting my second career, and I remember someone asking me what would make me a good summer associate,” said Kalka.
“I showed up to work every day at six a m. and started working,” she recalls answering. “I worked until basically four o’clock every day straight through lunch. I went for a run and then I went to class from six to nine and then I studied until one a m. Rinse and repeat. I did that, four days a week. And I used my free time, my vacation days, and my weekends to do law review and to study and to do all those other things so that I could do it.”
“There is nothing you can throw at me that I can’t figure out how to juggle, how to balance and how to do. And I think that’s going to make me pretty good at this job,” she concluded.
“And it did; it served me well at figuring out how to manage chaos.”
Her real estate banking background had taught her the nuts and bolts of an agreement, Kalka says. But it was Cohen who taught her to look at the humdrum duty of due diligence in its greater context: as something with a purpose that reaches beyond a simple assemblage of boilerplate parts.
She says she learned that all the elements of a deal must work together. The terms, the reps, the covenants, the disclosures must join like building blocks building neatly to the broader elements of a deal. Unlike many associates she began to find elegance — even beauty — in the scut work of due diligence.
“I remember that ‘aha’ moment when I finally started getting into purchase agreements and thinking: ‘That’s why this matters.’
Her love of the work did not go unnoticed.
Michael Considine, a colleague at Kirkland, met Kalka at Jones Day when he moved to Dallas from New York in 2013. Considine had been with the firm since 2005, and Kalka for barely two years. He was impressed with her level of sophistication.
“While early in her career, she was operating at the same level as the senior associates in New York,” he said. “We quickly started working together on some very significant matters.” By 2014, barely three years into her career, Kalka was working with Considine on a $2.9 billion carveout involving Procter & Gamble and Berkshire Hathaway.
“Not only is she an exceptionally talented attorney, she’s one of the hardest working partners I’ve known,” Considine said.
Kalka left Jones Day for Winston & Strawn in 2017. A year later, Considine left Jones Day to establish a Dallas office for Kirkland. It was Considine who recommended Kalka to Andy Calder as “a rising star.”
After two years at Winston, Kalka joined Kirkland in 2019. Calder says her refined skillset has been evident from the start.
“Melissa is an excellent technical lawyer first and foremost,” said Calder. “She is also one of the most client relationship-driven lawyers I have ever worked with; always willing to go the extra mile for her client and constantly looking for ways to improve.”
“Melissa is very good at absorbing and incorporating the good traits of those she works with, and not absorbing or incorporating the faults.”
“She also works as hard as anyone on our platform,” said Calder. “It’s often tough to keep up with her.”
In November 2021 there was one deal that changed everything. A consortium of investment giant KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners announced a $15 billion deal to acquire and take private Dallas-based CyrusOne, a data center REIT. The deal was the largest data center transaction to date, and the consortium was advised by a Kirkland team led by Calder, John Pitts and Kalka.
It was that deal that marked the beginning of the current wave data center development driven by artificial intelligence and private equity — not only in Texas but across the nation.
After the deal, Kalka said, she and Calder had talked, they realized that the CyrusOne take-private deal was the beginning of something different.
Data center deals in 2017 were largely commercial real estate transactions, with some data centers dedicated to calculation, but many others involved in content storage for emails, websites, company records, credit card receipts, invoices and the like.
But with the advent of hyperscale computing for artificial intelligence, the market was changing dramatically, dovetailing the demand for some of the most robust elements of M&A: real estate, power, energy infrastructure, software, precision manufacturing, energy transition, Rare Earth minerals, water and other natural resources.
“AI was really starting to churn more,” said Kalka. “People were starting to not just take on customers doing cloud-based services, but they were doing AI based services. And suddenly, you weren’t just talking about 48-megawatt buildings or 70-megawatt buildings; you were talking about 100, 200, 400 megawatts. And the quantum to build a data center of that size and scale just becomes significant.”
“Our clients were looking at data center investments not as real estate anymore. It was a hybrid product. It was a combination between real estate and an infrastructure,” Kalka said. “And that’s how people are investing in data centers. They’re doing so as a hybrid product.”
Kirkland, like other large firms, began to assemble its data center practice as combinations of skills. And for the group that congealed as a result, Kalka has become what she describes as “the tip of the spear.”
“There’s a group of us, a core group of real estate, customer contracting, power, finance, corporate — our little brain trust — and we talk, honestly, every day, and get together on the weekends and chat.”
The forces behind the $15 billion CyrusOne deal that seemed so massive a bit more than four years ago is now driving $30 billion, $40 billion and $60 billion deals. The stakes are high, and the group is built around the wheel of due diligence and coordinated detail that Kalka learned to love early in her career. And they spend a lot of time together because details matter on those massive bottom lines.
“We talk all the time because you have to figure out the real estate work up front and how it will work with the power, with the customer contracting, and so forth. Because if you don’t, the customer contracts and the power contracts aren’t going to work with what you actually need to do with the project through the life of the project.”
“I think many people realize how all of these things have to fit together. Otherwise, you are not setting yourself up for success, and it starts hitting your returns, which is what matters to sponsors,” said Kalka.
Kalka credits much of her success to Calder and a Kirkland culture that allots power to effort and results. And Calder, she says, walks the walk.
“People would move mountains for Andy because he would move mountains for us. You want to work with somebody who leads from the front and is willing to roll up their sleeves.”
“Andy’s been on all-nighters with me trying to get deals done and across the finish line. He’s very much a practicing lawyer, even with the responsibilities of everything else. His name’s not just in the press release because of a relationship; Andy is in a press release because Andy’s rolling up his sleeves and sitting at the table, too.”
“It’s a true meritocracy,” says Kalka. “He’s watched me grow, he’s watched me take on new deals, new challenges, and he’s given me opportunities. And I get those opportunities because I’ve proven myself.”
She’s noted the relative paucity of women in the transactional end of the profession. But gender is not something that has constrained her career.
“I guess it’s something that’s never really bothered me. At Winston and Jones Day I was usually the only woman or a limited group, and I was never across from another woman on a transaction while I was there. What’s actually exceptional here (at Kirkland) is that I could staff an entire deal team bottom to top of women, and they would be some of the best lawyers in this firm. And I can’t think of many other places that you can do that,” she said.
Despite her enduring commitment to work, Kalka says she still finds time for the things she loves. She likes to cook at home, a skill that she inherited from her mother, an excellent cook.
She also runs for fitness and pleasure, managing to fit in at least one half-marathon each year. She likes golf, but mostly as time spent with her father. She’s learning tennis because it doesn’t swallow up so much time.
And then, of course, there’s her family.
“I don’t have kids. We were not lucky enough to be able to have them. But I’ve got two nieces in New Orleans, and they are the light of my life. If they need me or they’re doing a competition, I’ll jump on an airplane and go see them — or they’ll come up here.”
Whether its personal or professional, it’s that expression of sheer determination seems to characterize just about everything Kalka does.
Calder sees it almost every day: “Often the deal flow and pace of working at Kirkland can be intimidating for some lawyers. Melissa has observed the environment and then excelled.”
“It will be fun to see what she does over the coming years.”