National Advisory Council: 2016
Jon is a Partner at KP. He started his lobbying career with the San Francisco law firm of Landels, Ripley and Diamond, which he left in 1996 to help start the predecessor firm to KP, the Kahl Pownall Companies. Jon leads KP’s advocacy efforts for financial services clients, including Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and the California Mortgage Bankers Association, among others. He also leads KP’s technology practice and has become a key voice on virtually all issues impacting Silicon Valley. Jon was the first outside lobbyist retained by Google (in 2006) and subsequently has been retained by other technology leaders, including Cisco, Airbnb, and Stripe. Jon also represents four large, national accounting firms (PWC, KPMG, EY, and Deloitte). Jon’s other clients include NBC Universal, the California Restaurant Association and the Experience Hertz Corporation.
He played a leading role in managing the financial services industry’s response to several critical issues, including legislative efforts to address the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, to enact new financial privacy laws, and to develop appropriate rules for internet lenders. On behalf of several technology clients, he helped negotiate a legislative compromise to enact new privacy legislation, and avoid a more onerous privacy initiative. In addition he led a multi-year effort to reform California income tax apportionment rules and served on the executive committee for the campaign to defend the new rules from repeal at the ballot. He also directed the legislative effort to authorize autonomous vehicles on public roads, and the development of regulations that authorized deployment of driverless vehicles.
Mr. Ross graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Political Economy of Industrial Societies. He received a law degree from the University of Santa Clara, where he served as the Research Editor of the Santa Clara Law Review. While in law school, Mr. Ross worked as a judicial extern for California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso.
