The model trains come out every November. Ted Kittila sets them up in the conference room of Halloran Farkas + Kittila, the Wilmington law firm he co-founded, and opens the doors. Neighbors come in. Kids press their faces to the glass. Last year, more than 100 people showed up and Santa made an appearance.
It is an odd image for a man who argues before federal courts of appeals and advises hedge funds on Delaware merger law. But it captures something true about how Kittila operates. He builds things. He opens the doors. Then he lets people in.
“The greatest impact comes from helping those who cannot stand up for themselves,” he says.
That instinct, not the trains, is what has shaped 25 years of one of the more quietly consequential legal careers in Delaware.
Ted Kittila’s Education
Ted Kittila did not grow up around lawyers. Seaford, Delaware, is not that kind of town. What it had was Brian Shirey, a Sunday school teacher who happened to hold a law degree and a habit of drawing the young Ted Kittila into debate. The kind where you had to have thought it through before you opened your mouth.
Kittila was also introduced to Karl Haller, a public defender in Georgetown, Delaware, with a civil practice on the side. Kittila worked for both of them. That experience, unpaid, informal, far from any big firm, gave him something a law school classroom couldn’t. It gave him a sense of what the law does to real people.
He went on to the University of Delaware’s Honors Program, graduated summa cum laude in International Relations, and won a Fulbright Scholarship to study Western European History in Frankfurt, Germany. He studied abroad in Bayreuth and Paris as an undergraduate. He then enrolled at the University of Minnesota Law School, graduating cum laude in 2000, earned a McCareins Award for excellence in antitrust scholarship. Kittila also competed on the Jessup Moot Court team, and served as a note and comment editor for the Minnesota Intellectual Property Review.
From there, a clerkship in the Delaware Court of Chancery, then Manhattan, Weil, Gotshal & Manges, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. He was doing the things young litigators with those credentials do. Moving up, billing hours, learning how the biggest firms in the country go to war.
He came back to Delaware in 2007 and the question slowly became whether he wanted to keep doing what big firms do, or whether he wanted to do something else entirely.
A Decision Made During a Holiday Celebration
The moment Ted Kittila decided to leave came during a Rosh Hashanah celebration. He was sitting there, listening, thinking about what it means to enter a new season. What it means to begin again.
He walked out knowing he had to go out on his own. The next morning, he walked into his firm and said he was leaving. His partners were caught completely off guard. One of them asked, flat out, what he planned to do for money.
“I said that I had faith that it was going to work out,” Kittila says.
One month later, he was running Greenhill Law Group out of a family room, a card table as a desk, building a Delaware litigation practice from nothing. No existing book of business to coast on. No partner to carry the load. Just a phone, a belief that there was work worth doing, and a conviction that he’d figure out how to get paid for doing it.
Thirteen years later, that leap produced Halloran Farkas + Kittila LLP, a firm he co-founded on January 1, 2017, with Michael Halloran, the former General Counsel of Bank of America, and Peter Farkas, a former DOJ antitrust attorney. They finalized the partnership agreement at the Inn at Perry Cabin in St. Michaels, Maryland. The firm now has 12 members and operates out of offices in Wilmington, New York, Los Angeles, and Jackson, Wyoming. It is approaching its 10th anniversary.
“Building something from scratch demands courage, faith, and a dose of insanity,” he says.
Ted Kittila and the Cases That Don’t Come with Easy Answers
The legal work Ted Kittila does is varied in a way that resists easy summary. He has appeared in every court in the State of Delaware. He holds admissions to the Second, Third, Ninth, and D.C. Circuit Courts of Appeals. He is admitted before the U.S. Supreme Court. He has provided expert testimony on Delaware law in both domestic and international proceedings.
His courtroom record includes a dismissal in a Court of Chancery dispute involving a SPAC merger, a successful Third Circuit appeal following a federal district court victory in a vendor dispute involving an international high-tech company, a Delaware receivership case that required enforcement proceedings in the People’s Republic of China, and a fiduciary duty finding in a corporate derivative award dispute. He has represented the Government of Nevis in U.S. Bankruptcy Court proceedings tied to the shutdown of the island nation’s largest employer. He has counseled Silicon Valley clients on novel interpretations of Delaware’s corporate ratification statutes. His work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, specifically around shareholder inspection rights, an area of Delaware law that grants minority shareholders meaningful access to corporate records.
Those are the headline cases. But the cases that seem to mean the most to Kittila are the ones that don’t generate fees.
He has represented victims of the October 7 attack in Israel. He took up the case of a Muslim prisoner denied Halal food. He defended a homeowner fined for flying the American flag outside his own house. None of these cases sound like the work of a corporate litigator. All of them sound like the work of someone who read “To Kill a Mockingbird” once and actually internalized it.
There is a copy of that book on the mantelpiece at Halloran Farkas + Kittila. Kittila put it there. “The story of Atticus Finch representing a wrongly accused man and standing up against a small community’s hatred and prejudice speaks to me as an attorney,” he says. Beside it sits “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens, kept as both a tribute to the Court of Chancery and a standing reminder of what equity looks like when it loses its way.
Now, Ted Kittila is serving as lead counsel in two simultaneous constitutional challenges, one against New York and one against Delaware, seeking to overturn both states’ assisted suicide laws. He calls these cases among the most important of his career. “This is a leading constitutional and disability-rights issue,” he says. “This is so incredibly important to me.”
These are not cases a man takes for the billable hours.
What It Costs and What It’s Worth
There is a story Kittila tells about a phone call he answered on vacation. A man in crisis, trial five days out, no attorney. Kittila was annoyed at himself for picking up.
The other attorney’s client declared bankruptcy the night before trial. Kittila walked into court alone, against a well-resourced firm, without the benefit of depositions he hadn’t taken or a case file he hadn’t built. Three days later, the court couldn’t rule for the other side. His client survived.
When Kittila went out on his own and opened Greenhill Law Group, the first person who called to sign up as a client was that same man. For more than 15 years since, he has been sent referral after referral. All of it tracing back to one answered call on a vacation Kittila didn’t want to interrupt.
“Every case is a story waiting to be told, a life waiting to be changed,” he says.
That sense of consequence shapes how Kittila thinks about the law at 50-something, with a quarter century of litigation behind him. He is not the attorney who reduces cases to strategy and settlement math. He’s the one who sits with clients through difficult seasons and tries to help them see beyond the immediate crisis.
In 2025, he completed the Leadership in Law Firms program at Harvard Law School Executive Education and was appointed to adjunct faculty at Rutgers Law School, where he teaches Trial Advocacy. He serves on the Executive Committee of the Rodney Inn of Court, mentoring younger members and helping to shape Inn programming.
He admires Winston Churchill for the comebacks. “He was a man that was counted out several times, but came back to lead the world back from the brink,” Kittila says. “His perseverance is a huge influence on my life.”
When asked to define success, he does not mention cases won or clients kept or firms built from card tables into five-office operations.
“Success is being comfortable in your own skin,” Kittila says. “It’s being able to sit and enjoy the quiet.”
For a man who has spent 25 years in rooms where everything is contested, that sounds less like a modest answer and more like an honest one.
