KEVIN SHEPHERD

Venable LLP

Kevin Shepherd, managing director of finance and chair of Venable’s Finance Committee at Venable LLP, assists clients with complex real estate transactions spanning development projects, professional sports stadiums, corporate headquarters leases, office tower acquisitions and electrical generation facilities. He represents some of the largest U.S. and global institutions in structuring and negotiating high-value, single-asset properties in major cities, and advises the country’s leading owner, operator and developer of collaborative life science, technology and agtech campuses in key urban innovation clusters. His clients include prominent corporations, pension funds, real estate investment trusts and institutional investors.

Shepherd is a national leader in bar organizations. He is the immediate past treasurer of the American Bar Association, the largest voluntary organization of attorneys and legal professionals in the world. Shepherd is the first Venable partner to serve as an ABA officer and only the third Maryland lawyer in the last century to hold an ABA officer position. He is a past president of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers, an invitation-only organization that is the premier association of U.S. real estate lawyers, and has chaired the ABA Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Section, one of the largest substantive sections within the ABA.

Currently, Shepherd serves as treasurer of the American Bar Endowment and chairs its finance committee. The ABE is a not-for-profit public charity that sponsors high-quality, affordable life and disability insurance for ABA members. Founded in 1942, the ABE recently surpassed $300 million in total grants. At Venable, Shepherd chairs the Finance Committee, which oversees the firm’s financial operations, policies and procedures, and previously chaired the firm’s Real Estate Practice Group for 12 years. He is a prolific author and speaker, both domestically and internationally, on commercial real estate matters, including the role of the legal profession in detecting and preventing money laundering and terrorist financing in business transactions.

Shepherd has strived to prevent federal regulation of the U.S. legal profession. State courts have traditionally regulated their lawyers since the Republic’s founding, and he believes it is incumbent on lawyers to ensure that this regulatory framework continues.

Achieving work-life balance is not easy and remains a challenge, Shepherd said. He periodically recalibrates that balance, and as time advances, it has become clearer to spend time with family, especially his two precious granddaughters.

Shepherd is proud to be a board member of the American Bar Endowment. Promoting access to justice, especially those most vulnerable, is central to one’s professional calling as a lawyer and those passionate about the rule of law, he said. For more than 60 years, with ABE funding, the American Bar Association Fund for Justice and Education has provided lawyers with opportunities to improve the justice system, their practice and profession and their communities through programs focused on access to justice, children and family rights, public education, professionalism and international justice.

Being recognized as an Icon is humbling, Shepherd said, and underscores the importance of passing along to the next generation with the skill sets required to be an effective lawyer in an ever-changing environment.

Shepherd was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas and spent weekends on the family farm outside the city.