General counsel to Vice President Al Gore's recount committee in the election aftermath in 2000

Klain was considered a legal and political prodigy: he graduated from Georgetown, and earned a Magna Cum Laude degree from Harvard Law school in 1987 before clerking for Supreme Court Justice Byron White. By 1994 he was chief of staff and counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno, and Time Magazine named him one of the 50 most promising leaders in America under the age of 40. He became assistant to President Clinton and then chief of staff and counselor to Al Gore in 1995 and was appointed staff director of the senate Democratic leadership committee. In 1999 Klain was named one of the top 20 young lawyers in the nation by the American Bar Associations' Barrister Magazine.

Klain was pushed out as Vice President Gore's chief of staff in 1999 by Gore's campaign chief Tony Coelho; Bill Daley brought him back in late 1999 after taking over from Coelho.

Ron Klain returned to a partnership at the Washington DC power firm O'Melveny & Myers, from which he'd taken a leave of absence to work on the Gore-Lieberman Recount Committee. He left O'Melveny in 2005 to become executive vice president and general counsel to the investment firm Revolution and is an advisor to The Blue Fund, which invests in companies that are committed to Democratic values. He has continued to keep his hand in several Democratic races, often working in an advisory capacity — for instance, consulting on General Wesley Clark's early bid for the Democratic nomination for the 2004 campaign; coordinating debate preparation for Senator John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid; and serving as informal advisor to Senator Joe Biden about a possible Presidential run in the current campaign.