Meet the Leader of the World’s Largest Law Firm

It might seem as though Kate Barton JD’87 was destined to become a corporate lawyer. “I always had a fascination with understanding how rules work, and solving complex puzzles,” Barton said recently. Good thing, because as CEO of Dentons, which is generally considered the world’s largest international law firm, every moment presents a different challenge that demands her attention and expertise.

Consider, for instance, the events of April 2, 2025, when the Trump administration announced sweeping new tariffs on imports from more than 180 countries, an upending of longstanding trade policies that sent international supply chains reeling. On that day Barton was in Jakarta, where a client was trying to get goods into the US. With the client’s profit margins at stake, Barton, who happens to be a leader in international tax law, triaged the urgent situation with the team at Dentons’ Indonesian office. In short order, she devised a plan that allowed the client to avoid the regulatory confusion by temporarily rerouting the goods to Canada.

I recently spoke with Barton via a video call. She was at the Dentons office in New York City, having just arrived there after three weeks working in London, Istanbul, and Washington, DC. Dentons operates in eighty-seven countries—that’s thirty-five more countries than the next-largest firm, Barton pointed out with evident pride—and employs more than 5,900 lawyers. “There is no typical day for the CEO of a global firm,” Barton said. “What I love about this job is the tremendous variety.” Variety that lately involves the very business of doing law in an era when a number of disruptive forces—from geopolitical instabilities to exponential advancements in artificial intelligence—are forcing law firms to rethink how they work with clients and grow their own market share and profits. “It’s a very competitive world out there,” Barton said, “and we have to be on our toes.”

Barton didn't get to the top job at a legal giant without pushing herself to always be at her best. Her father was a police officer, and her mother a nurse, both of them first-generation Irish Americans who raised their family in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston. Barton earned a full scholarship to Boston University, where she majored in accounting, and later excelled at BC Law. She wound up a member of the Order of the Coif, which recognizes the top ten percent of law school graduates. “BC Law is where I feel I came into my own,” said Barton, who these days serves on the BC Law Dean’s Advisory Council.

While at the Law School, Barton met a law fellow who introduced her to an internship opportunity at Ernst & Young, where she would go on to become the Boston office’s first female tax partner in 1996. “Getting promoted to partner was probably the most difficult thing I had to do,” Barton recalled. She was bringing a lot of lucrative business through the door, so she was shocked when she heard whispers that her name wasn’t coming up in meetings about selecting new partners. “I had good mentors, but none of them were drumming on the table, saying, ‘It’s her time,’” Barton said. “I was probably a bit naïve in thinking that just hard work would get me there. I had to do more self-advocacy.” She directly confronted a managing partner to make her designs known. “He said, ‘You want to be a partner?’ I said, ‘Hello, sunshine! Yes, I do.’” Barton spent nearly three decades at the firm. By the time she reached Ernst & Young’s mandatory retirement age in 2023, she had ascended to global vice chair and was CEO of the firm’s tax advisory services, which generated $12.5 billion in revenue.

Barton took the next year off—she calls it her “gap year”—but then a headhunter presented the opportunity at Dentons. Her overarching goal, she said, is to make Dentons not only the biggest law firm, but the best at everything it does. A big part of that, she noted, is embracing revolutionary technology. She’s all in on AI to “augment, not replace” the work of lawyers, she said. “We’re spending more on technology than ever before,” she said, pointing out that it is not uncommon nowadays for it to be a law practice’s second-largest expense after staffing. There are challenges with AI, she acknowledged, and clients are demanding transparency as to how and when it is used, but she said she’s excited about the technology. “I love to go fast,” she said. “Many people feel like it’s a lot to absorb. Whether you see risk or you see opportunity depends on your framing. I think the opportunity outweighs the risk.”

What does the future look like for the increasingly tech-infused business of law? Barton said it’s most important for lawyers to master the same skill set she credits BC Law for cultivating within her: emotional intelligence. “That’s what’s going to differentiate you from a machine,” she said. “They might be able to spout answers, but they’re not going to be able to build a relationship with a client that wants to be heard and understood.” ◽