Global Leadership Exchange with David Kaufman, Nixon Peabody, in conversation with Charlie Green

What does it take to build a global client development strategy in the legal industry without opening an office on every continent? In the latest installment of tml Partners’ Global Leadership Exchange, our Managing Director, Charlie Green, sat down with David Kaufman, Director of Global Strategies at Nixon Peabody, to discuss trust, geography and the technology reshaping professional services around the world.

Theme One: Trust & Collaboration

There is a particular kind of ego required to succeed as a non-lawyer in a law firm. Not the loud kind, but the quiet confidence needed to build relationships, open doors, and then allow others to take center stage.

David Kaufman has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this at Nixon Peabody. His position as Director of Global Strategies puts him at the center of the firm’s most important client relationships, but his operating principle is deliberately self-effacing. Attorneys are the experts. His job is to create the conditions in which they can prove it.

“I view my job as making them look good. I’m 100% in their corner — I want them to be successful.”

What makes this more than a philosophy is the practical discipline with which David applies it. When he brings a new client into the fold, the onboarding framing is deliberate: “You’ve talked to me; now you’re going to talk to the real experts.” That positioning, consistently repeated and never undermined, builds the internal credibility that allows him to be trusted with the firm’s most important relationships. Partners who rose through the ranks knowing David was always in their corner have, over time, brought him into rooms that no job title alone would have opened.

The same principle applies laterally. David is quick to credit and collaborate with Nixon Peabody’s Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer, acknowledging that they understand aspects of the firm’s holistic go-to-market strategy that he simply does not. Rather than bypassing that expertise, his instinct is to embrace and leverage it. In a profession still prone to territorial behavior, that collaborative orientation is more than just culturally healthy; it is commercially superior.

For tml Partners, this resonates. In our work placing commercial and marketing leaders within professional services firms, the candidates who endure and thrive are those who have learned to lead through influence rather than authority by building the kind of gravitational trust that does not require a title to sustain it.

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Theme Two: Global Capabilities

The conventional wisdom in global professional services has long been that scale requires a physical presence, that to serve clients across 140 countries, you need offices in 140 countries. Nixon Peabody has spent nearly three decades proving that argument wrong, and David Kaufman is its most persuasive advocate.

The logic is straightforward, even if the execution is not. A firm that plants its flag everywhere ends up being the 30th-best option in every market it enters. A firm that instead cultivates deep, tested relationships with the single best independent firm in each jurisdiction, built on years of shared clients, mutual accountability, and genuine personal regard, can offer something that a sprawling office network rarely delivers: the confidence that comes from being introduced by someone who is genuinely trusted on both sides of the table.

“You can see better collaboration with firms I’ve worked with for almost 20 years than within a large firm where offices just share an email signature.”

David’s global work also requires him to be a fluent translator between legal cultures. He describes the sticker shock European clients experience when confronted with US billing rates, the fundamentally different risk appetites of American and European private equity investors, and the contrast between heavily statutory European labor law and the far more negotiable framework that characterizes its American equivalent.

Understanding these nuances, and communicating them clearly without embarrassing the client or underselling the risk, is, he says, one of the most distinctive and valuable parts of his role.

For David, the lesson is straightforward: global capability is not built through office openings. It is built through trust, accumulated over years, between firms, clients, and individuals.

Theme Three: Technology & Innovation

David is an enthusiastic adopter of AI, but not an unquestioning one.

He uses it every day. It helps him sharpen his writing, accelerate research, and quickly make sense of large volumes of information. One particularly practical application is conference preparation, where AI can help cut through attendee lists and identify the individuals most relevant to a firm’s priorities. Looking ahead, he is particularly excited by the prospect of AI-powered event matchmaking tools that understand a user’s objectives, evaluate potential connections, and surface the handful of conversations most worth having.

Yet David is equally clear-eyed about the technology’s current limitations.

While AI can be a powerful research assistant, he is skeptical of its ability to substitute for genuine strategic thinking. He has developed a simple test. When clients arrive with highly detailed strategic recommendations, he will occasionally enter the same question into a large language model and compare the responses.

“Clients are coming in with very detailed approaches. Then I type the same question into an LLM, and think – ah, that’s where that came from.”

The observation is delivered with humor, but it reflects a serious point. Access to information is becoming increasingly democratized. The real value lies not in generating answers, but in applying judgment, context, and experience to determine which answers matter.

For David, this is where the legal profession’s future becomes particularly interesting.

The most significant impact of AI is unlikely to be in replacing attorneys. Instead, it will come from removing the layers of administrative and procedural work that consume valuable time today. Compliance checks, document review, routine drafting, and other repetitive tasks are all increasingly susceptible to automation. If technology can absorb that burden, lawyers can devote more time to the work clients value most: navigating ambiguity, identifying risk, solving complex problems, and building trusted relationships.

In that sense, AI is not diminishing professional expertise; it is increasing the premium placed upon it.

The implications are already becoming visible in the market. David notes that questions about AI utilization now appear in most major pitch processes. Clients increasingly expect firms to demonstrate not only that they are using technology, but that they are doing so in a thoughtful and commercially meaningful way. Firms unable to articulate a credible strategy risk being left behind.

As technology becomes more deeply embedded in professional services, David also anticipates growing demand for a new generation of commercially minded professionals: individuals who combine technological fluency with the interpersonal skills required to navigate complex organizations and build consensus across multiple stakeholder groups.

The firms that thrive over the next decade will not simply be those that adopt new technologies fastest. They will be the firms that combine technological capability with human judgment most effectively.

At tml Partners, we see this shift accelerating across the professional services landscape. The demand for client strategy leaders, commercially oriented business development professionals, and technology-literate growth leaders continues to grow as firms seek individuals capable of bridging the gap between innovation and execution.

If you are interested in discussing these themes further, please do get in touch.