Blackstone paid Kirkland & Ellis $87.8 million in legal fees in 2025, the private equity giant disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing late Friday afternoon. That represented a 13% drop from the $101.3 million in legal fees in 2024 but more than doubled the $41.6 in fees it received from the PE firm in 2023. Kirkland & Ellis worked on at least a dozen transactions for New York City-based Blackstone last year, according to press releases from the law firm. Those included Blackstone's $25 billion investment to build out data centers and natural gas power plants in Pennsylvania, its $18 billion purchase of the medical technology company Hologic and its $11 billion purchase of TXNM Energy. Friday's filing also included compensation for Blackstone senior executives, including Chief Legal Officer John Finley. Finley, who's been legal chief since 2010, earned $23.7 million, a 38% increase from the $17.2 million he received in 2024. CEO Stephen Schwarzman earned $125.6 million, 49% more than the $84.0 million he received in 2024. Blackstone executives have called 2025 a banner year. The company's assets under management rose 13%, to $1.3 trillion, and revenue spiked 9%, to $14.5 billion. Meanwhile, distributable earnings soared 19%, to $7.1 billion. Blackstone makes the unusual legal fee disclosures to comply with SEC rules on potential conflicts of interest stemming from having an attorney on the board who's employed by a law firm that receives work from the company. Those rules came into play for the private equity firm when Reginald "Reg" Brown, a partner in Kirkland's Washington, D.C., office, joined its board in 2020. Brown, who earlier in his career was an associate White House counsel under President George W. Bush, came to Kirkland after 15 years as a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, where he was chair of its financial institutions group and vice chair of its crisis management and strategic response group. Reached by Law.com, Brown declined to comment. In the SEC filing, Blackstone said its relationship with Kirkland predates Brown's joining its board. It also said that Brown's interest in Kirkland's $87.8 million in 2025 fees "is estimated to be less than 1%." The filing added that "Mr. Brown does not receive any direct compensation, specific origination bonus or other disproportionate allocation from legal fees we pay to Kirkland." Only a small number of public companies have law firm lawyers on their board, in part because of the potential for conflicts. The fee-disclosure rule also has the effect of discouraging lawyer appointments. That rule also has come into play at Meta, where Robert Kimmitt, senior internal counsel at Wilmer, joined the board in 2020. Meta paid Wilmer about $48 million in 2024. Meta hasn't yet disclosed how much it paid Wilmer in 2025. The SEC has similar disclosure rules for companies with potential conflicts stemming from familial connections. For example, Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, the parent of Snapchat, has two family members working at law firms used by Snap. His father, John Spiegel, works for Munger Tolles & Olson, which received $52.3 million in legal fees from Snap last year, according to an SEC filing earlier this month. That's up from $51.2 million in 2024. Meanwhile, Spiegel's stepmother, Debra Wong Yang, works at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. Snap paid Gibson Dunn $5.5 million in 2025, compared with $11.6 million in 2024.