Mr Paul Tanaka > Kirkland & Ellis LLP > San Francisco, United States > Lawyer Profile

Kirkland & Ellis LLP
555 CALIFORNIA STREET
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94104
CALIFORNIA
United States
Paul Tanaka photo

Position

Paul leads Kirkland’s Global Environmental Practice, serving as head environmental counsel for a large number of private equity firms and public companies. Paul’s clients rely on him to identify and strategically manage environmental regulatory compliance and other environmental liabilities. He is a big-picture thinker and creative problem solver that clients count on to be both commercial and practical, and to create bespoke and efficient solutions for everything from environmental crises to more routine matters of compliance and governance and all aspects of transactions.

Education

Claremont McKenna College, B.A., Government, 1997. University of Hawai’i School of Law, J.D., 2000.

Lawyer Rankings

United States > Environment > Environment: transactional

(Leading lawyers)

Paul Tanaka – Kirkland & Ellis LLP

The environmental transactional practice group at Kirkland & Ellis LLP is ‘respectful, knowledgeable, and client-focusedand is led out of San Francisco by Paul Tanaka. It fields practitioners across the US and is well versed in environmental due diligence, pre-deal counseling, risk mitigation, environmental insurance analysis and procurement, and regulatory and enforcement matters. The firm is well known for its representation of top-tier private equity clients and handles deals in the energy, infrastructure, and industrial sectors, among other areas. Tanaka handles the full gamut of transactional issues from compliance and governance to crisis management and is experienced in a wide range of transactions from small venture capital investments to large cross-border deals. Jonathan Kidwell in Dallas is a key name for M&A, bankruptcies, financing transactions and real estate investments hand has considerable experience of deals in heavily regulated sectors. Toby Chun left in January 2022, while Emily Tabak joined in Salt Lake city from Holland & Hart LLP and Sam Dykstra joined from Ballard Spahr LLP in New York.