After law school, Professor Kilborn clerked for Judge Walter K. Stapleton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He then was a bankruptcy associate with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York and at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, DC.

In nearly two decades of academic research, Professor Kilborn has focused on a comparison of bankruptcy and insolvency in the U.S. with similar systems in Europe and elsewhere in the world. He has written numerous articles and a book on comparative bankruptcy for individuals (including an analysis of Islamic law, shari'a), he co-authored a book on international cooperation in cross-border business bankruptcy, and he is a national reporter and co-editor of a series of detailed comparative analyses of business reorganization practices around the world (the latter two items published by Oxford University Press).

Professor Kilborn chaired a drafting group for a World Bank project on the treatment of insolvency of natural persons, and he has advised several national governments on their development of personal insolvency laws. He has been appointed to four, two-year terms as the Van der Grinten Chair in International and Comparative Insolvency Law at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, as well as a one-semester term as the Robert M. Zinman Scholar in Residence at the American Bankruptcy Institute.

Professor Kilborn joined the John Marshall faculty in 2007 and teaches Secured Transactions, Bankruptcy, Corporations, Civil Procedure II, and Payment Systems.