During law school Professor Kalo was a note and comment editor on the Michigan Law Review. Following law school he was a judicial law clerk for Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sterry R. Waterman. In 1969, he joined the Phoenix, Arizona law firm of Streich, Lang, Weeks, Cardon & French. Two years later he left private practice to become co-director of the University of Michigan Law School first clinical program. He joined the faculty of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law in August 1972. From 1975 to 1987, he taught in continuing legal education programs sponsored by the National Institute for Trial Advocacy. From 1979 to 1987, he served as the Southeast regional director of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy. When he first joined the faculty his focus was civil litigation but his teaching and research interests shifted to environmental issues associated with coastal and ocean resources development. In addition to numerous articles on topics related to ocean and coastal resource issues, he has co-authored a coastal and ocean law casebook, which is in its fifth edition, and is teaching an environmental ocean and coastal law course as well as a first-year course in property and an upper class seminar in Advanced Property. He has also taught international environmental law.
In 1989, the governor appointed him to a four-year term on the North Carolina Marine Science Council, which became the North Carolina Ocean Affairs Council in 1991. Professor Kalo was the John J. Sparkman Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Alabama Law School in the spring of 2002. He also taught at the Edouard Lambert Institute of Comparative Law in Lyon, France, in March 1994, March 2003 and April 2006. During the summer of 2008 taught U.S. Fishery Law and Policy at the University of Augsburg in Augsburg, Germany. Professor Kalo is a member of the federal Bureau of Ocean Management sponsored North Carolina Task Force on Renewable Energy Activities in North Carolina's offshore federal waters.
He is also the co-director of the North Carolina Coastal Resources Law, Planning and Policy Center, a partnership of the law school, the North Carolina Sea Grant Program, and the UNC Department and City and Regional Planning. Under his guidance and that of his co-director, Lisa Schiavinato of the North Carolina Sea Grant Program, the center has undertaken a number of projects, among which include providing legal and policy research support for the legislatively created North Carolina Waterfront Access Study Committee during 2006-2007, preparing a 2009 report for the North Carolina General Assembly on "Legal Issues Related to Water-Based Wind Energy", conducting a 2009 study and writing a report for the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission on "Emerging Ocean Resource Issues,"and sponsoring and conducting the annual "Shape of the Coast" continuing legal education programs during 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009. In 2010 the coastal resources center will begin a study of emerging estuarine and inner coast issues. Twice a year the coastal resources center publishes a legal newsletter entltled "Legal Tides," which is sent to 1400 coastal lawyers, coastal planners, and other interested parties.