Hessam Kalantar

We are commercially savvy lawyers with many years of in-house and private practice experience in multiple jurisdictions, including business hubs such as New York, London and Dubai. We founded the firm so that companies, investors and entrepreneurs can benefit from advice that is commercially sensible as well as legally astute, and with cost-effective fee arrangements that do away with the traditional ‘billable hour’. Leveraging on our experience and competencies in the USA, we also serve as a resource for US and international investment initiatives inbound to the Middle East, Africa and other emerging markets, and advise on deals originated in the Middle East and Africa that are outbound to the US. Our goal is to be the firm of choice for clients with respect to their most challenging legal issues and most significant business transactions.

Kalantar Business Law Group, or KBLG, was launched in 2018 and only after a year of operations was nominated as “Emerging Law Firm of the Year” for the Middle East region by The Oath, a highly regarded legal industry association comprised of in-house counsel, law firms and other legal practitioners in the private and public sectors across the Middle East.

KBLG is committed to four guiding principles:

Business Enablement

We see ourselves as business enablers, not merely lawyers. We aspire to grasp the market, competitive, regulatory and consumer aspects of your business, to align ourselves with your vision, and volunteer our views beyond lawyering where we believe we can be helpful.

Responsiveness

KBLG will not have a long roster of clients. We will instead seek to dedicate our resources to clients we can partner with beyond isolated matters. We pledge attentiveness and continuity from senior, experienced lawyers, something that is often difficult for smaller clients with legal budgets to secure from their large law firms.

Rationalizing Legal Spend

Unlike most traditional law firms, we price our services on a project and retainer basis, and occasionally on the success of a transaction. We even help oversee legal operations for companies managing voluminous or complex transactions and legal risk issues, and every time we cut materially overall legal spend on an ‘apples to apples’ comparison basis.  We have jettisoned the billable hour. By containing overheads and costing our services more creatively, we strive to reduce clients’ long-term legal spend significantly.

To the Point

No more words, said or written, than are necessary to get the job done, unless otherwise requested.

Hessam Kalantar is admitted to the Bars of New York, USA and Ontario, Canada. He is a graduate of McGill University, where he earned both common and civil law degrees. Hessam has almost twenty years of firm and in-house practice experience in Canada, US and the Middle East, including at some of the most pre-eminent global law firms, among them Debevoise & Plimpton, Paul Hastings, and Kirkland & Ellis.

In New York and Dubai Hessam has acted for leading private equity, venture capital and other providers of capital in connection with investments in technology and e- commerce, media, financial services, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications, energy, hospitality and food and beverage industries, among others.

Hessam has worked on many landmark financing and restructuring transactions, including one of the largest restructurings in the Middle East and the largest syndicated lending in Turkey.

His experience in the Middle East encompasses advice on deploying capital into the Middle East region, company and fund formation, market entry, early and growth stage financings, and investment exits. And Hessam’s technology practice, including advising technology start-ups, spans the period from the dotcom and business process outsourcing booms through to cloud computing, Fintech and artificial intelligence (AI). Hessam is familiar with the transactional, governance and intellectual property aspects of AI, having completed data science courses in machine learning, neural networks and big data.

After over a decade in global law firms, Hessam spent many years as Deputy General Counsel at a significant, emerging markets telecommunications investment group operating across several geographies.