Deneese Walia Levin

Deneese Walia Levin is Managing Director of Law Firm Optimization at C Street Advisory Group, where she works with firm leaders to modernize their businesses, strengthening legal operations, accelerating technology adoption, and building the market intelligence and business development capabilities required to compete and grow.

Deneese joined C Street after a brief retirement, drawn back by what she sees as the most consequential moment for the legal profession in a generation. Legal operations, technology adoption, associate training and utilization, and the economics of Big Law itself are all evolving at once. Having spent more than two decades advising and executing on the delivery of top-tier legal services, she understands both what firms need to build and why meaningful change inside a law firm is so difficult. She believes the firms that get this moment right will define the next era of the profession.

Deneese has spent her entire career in Big Law, focused on client growth, practice group strategy and expansion, technology integration and adoption, marketing, knowledge management, and business development. Before joining C Street, she spent more than 20 years at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, most recently as a Partner and Head of Knowledge, Markets & Strategy for the firm’s Debt Finance practice – a role dedicated to building the debt finance practice of the future. Over her tenure, the practice grew 10x into a global group of more than 450 attorneys and one of the top debt finance practices in the world. 

In that role, Deneese built and led an integrated platform spanning knowledge management, business development, market intelligence, and technology innovation — advising practice group leadership and partnering with the firm’s Global Management Committee on enterprise-wide strategic initiatives. She spearheaded the practice’s operational transformation, evaluating and deploying emerging legal technologies and managing relationships with a dozen technology vendors. A significant focus of her work included building the practice’s market intelligence and competitive analysis capabilities, focusing on client expansion – market mapping, competitive intelligence, and client development strategies to deepen existing relationships and open new ones. She also designed a comprehensive legal education and training program serving debt finance attorneys at every level, and led a global team of professionals across knowledge management, business development, and operations.

Deneese began her career at Kirkland & Ellis as a corporate associate in the firm’s Debt Finance practice, becoming partner in 2009. In that role, she represented institutional clients in multibillion-dollar financing transactions and M&A, developing deep expertise in transaction structuring, credit documentation, and regulatory compliance. Her practice spanned acquisition financings, leveraged buyouts, recapitalizations, liability management exercises and restructurings for some of the world’s largest private equity sponsors, portfolio companies, private credit firms and lenders.

Deneese earned her Juris Doctor from The University of Chicago Law School and her Bachelor of Arts from Northwestern University, where she also received an Undergraduate Leadership Certificate from the Kellogg School of Management.