The Degradation of Big Law

The Degradation of Big Law

By intimidating and disarming potential sources of legal resistance, Trump weakens one of the last institutional barriers standing between his administration and unbridled executive power.

“The dirty truth is that many people find fascism to be not particularly horrible,” wrote critic Michael Parenti thirty years ago in an essay titled “Fascism in a Pinstriped Suit.” We can now count some of the leaders of America’s white-shoe law firms among those people. On March 20, Paul Weiss—one of the most powerful and wealthy firms in the country—finalized a deal with President Donald Trump to avert an executive order that blocked its lawyers from dealing with the federal government. Instead of challenging a blatant First Amendment violation designed to punish the firm for its political speech and affiliations, its vaunted litigators folded without a fight.

Trump’s retributive assault on Big Law is just the latest example of a volatile and vengeful president weaponizing state power against his perceived enemies, including journalists and university students. But Trump’s throttling of the high-powered legal establishment is especially chilling—not because corporate law was ever a paragon of democratic values, but because of its capacity to provide a check on the president. By intimidating and disarming potential sources of legal resistance, Trump weakens one of the last institutional barriers standing between his administration and unbridled executive power.

The capitulation of Paul Weiss—joined Friday by Skadden, Tuesday by Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and yesterday by Milbank, all of which entered into preemptive deals—reveals a cowed professional-managerial class that would rather sacrifice democracy than its property. Affluent attorneys can retreat to their alpine compounds and Hamptons hideaways, abandoning the front lines to public interest lawyers. But they cannot outrun authoritarianism in the long run. Their wealth may buy them time, but it cannot insulate them from the systemic dismantling of the rule of law that facilitated the building of their fortunes in the first place. When history tallies which institutions stood against democratic collapse, it will note that America’s legal aristocracy—those with the most to give and the least to lose—was missing in action.

Since reassuming the presidency ten weeks ago, Trump has signed five unprecedented executive orders punishing law firms that have represented causes or employed people he despises. The first suspended security clearances for certain attorneys at Covington & Burling. The second attacked Perkins Coie, revoking security clearances for all its employees, prohibiting government contractors from retaining the firm, and barring its attorneys’ access to government officials and buildings. The third, fourth, and fifth applied similar restrictions on Paul Weiss, Jenner & Block, and WilmerHale.

Trump’s decrees are patently unconstitutional. As legal questions go, this is not a difficult one. Just last term, the Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reaffirmed the basic First Amendment principle that “government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.”

Perkins Coie sued the government less than a week after the administration issued the executive order targeting the firm; within twenty-four hours a federal judge enjoined part of the order, finding Trump’s retaliatory actions were likely violations of constitutional rights to free speech, free association, and due process. Paul Weiss could have sued and received a similar order almost instantaneously—a path successfully taken by Jenner & Block and WilmerHale on Friday. Yet rather than following these firms’ examples of principled legal resistance, Paul Weiss’s chairman, Brad Karp, scurried to the White House to grovel before Trump.

In their face-to-face meeting, Trump reportedly made no explicit demands, letting Karp offer up ideas to appease him. Their collaboration led to an agreement with two main parts: a quid pro quo and a struggle session. Karp agreed to provide $40 million in “pro bono legal services” to “support the Administration’s initiatives, including: assisting our Nation’s veterans, fairness in the Justice System, the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and other mutually agreed projects.” This is a perverse redefinition of pro bono—from the Latin pro bono publico, meaning “for the public good”—twisting it into coerced free labor for the most powerful man in America, who already commands an army of government lawyers. The agreement disguises extortion as charity. Threatened with losing clients, as Perkins Coie did after the administration’s executive order, Paul Weiss engaged in a contemptible quid pro quo.

The ambit of these “pro bono legal services” is foreboding. In Trumpian parlance, the vague commitment to “fairness in the Justice System” means targeting his political opponents. The Task Force to Combat Antisemitism has little to do with fighting actual antisemitism; it’s led by a Trump loyalist who recently shared an antisemitic post from an avowed white supremacist. As Christopher R. Browning recently explained in the New York Review of Books, Trump, a “major disseminator and legitimizer of antisemitism in American politics,” has seized “the pretext of antisemitism to wage a campaign whose real purpose is to defund, demoralize, and diminish” higher education. The $40 million bank of billable hours risks entangling Paul Weiss in Trump’s autocratic disgraces.

Worse still, Karp agreed to a public shaming of Mark Pomerantz, a former Paul Weiss partner who oversaw aspects of the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Trump’s finances. Trump gloated that Karp had “acknowledged the wrongdoing of former Paul, Weiss partner, Mark Pomerantz, the grave dangers of Weaponization, and the vital need to restore our System of Justice.” The firm also made wide-ranging concessions undermining its independence as an associational entity (the agreement states that “law firms should not favor any political party when it comes to choosing their clients”) and denounced the DEI policies it has long used (pledging to pursue “merit-based hiring” and to conduct an internal audit of its employment practices). It has since deleted press releases from its website touting its past work challenging Trump to defend the rights of immigrants and Muslims and has begun severing ties with progressive groups.

It’s breathtaking for any law firm to humiliate itself in this way. But it’s especially jarring to see it from Paul Weiss, which has long positioned itself as the liberal conscience of Big Law. In the twentieth century, the firm arguably did more than any other to diversify the upper echelons of the WASP-dominated eastern legal establishment. “Paul Weiss,” Jeremiah Lambert and Geoffrey Stewart observe in The Anointed: New York’s White Shoe Law Firms, “claimed to be the first major New York City firm to break down the barrier of Jews practicing with Gentiles.” It was the first major New York firm to hire a black female associate and to promote a woman to partnership.

In exchange for grueling hours, Paul Weiss promises young associates an elusive combination of material prosperity and moral purpose. Its website, yet to be fully purged of liberal vestiges, claims its lawyers are part of a storied firm that propelled the civil rights movement and fought “the McCarthy hysteria,” defending both “the largest financial institutions in the world, and the earth’s neediest citizens.”

This mythology, of course, never captured the full experience of working at Paul Weiss. The balance has always been tilted more heavily toward representing the wealthy institutions of the world than its neediest citizens, with a roster of clients including Exxon Mobil, Philip Morris, CitiGroup, chemical conglomerates, and the Sackler family of Purdue Pharma. But the commitment of many lawyers at the firm to pro bono work—and the firm’s willingness to let them do it if they also did the paying work for banks and big business—was real. Paul Weiss attorneys argued one of the first legal challenges to New York’s ban on marriage equality and successfully litigated the landmark gay rights case of United States v. Windsor.

During the first Trump administration, firm lawyers played an important role in challenging Trump’s family separations, anti-Muslim animus, and white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. Karp criticized Trump and coordinated legal resistance efforts against many of his policies. “It’s important to speak out when you see violations of the rule of law,” Karp said in an interview last summer. “The firm has long had a history of being engaged in . . . cutting-edge social justice, racial justice, criminal justice matters, and it’s why I joined.” I witnessed Paul Weiss’s dedication to pro bono work firsthand while working as a legal fellow at the ACLU in 2022.

What explains his dizzying shift from ACLU ally to Trump apparatchik? Occam’s razor suggests money. Paul Weiss’s earlier pro bono work and performative gestures came at minimal financial cost. Its corporate clients didn’t care much either way. And in the fierce competition for Harvard and Yale Law graduates, such posturing had recruiting benefits; Karp, in the 2024 interview, said being viewed as a firm with social justice ties “has helped position us in the marketplace.” For associates already trapped in the gilded cage, the firm’s progressive image created just enough sense of righteous mission to justify all the billable hours that underwrite partners’ private jets. But when standing on principle threatens the bottom line, high-minded values evaporate.

Trump responds to and respects people with money. Big Law partners have built their lives around the same principles. Under Karp, Paul Weiss has raked in record profits: its annual revenue sits north of $2.6 billion. The firm regularly poaches rainmaker partners with $20 million annual compensation packages. Even non-superstar equity partners take home around $7.5 million in annual earnings; first-year lawyers at the firm make just shy of a quarter of a million dollars yearly, roughly six times the median personal income in the United States.

In a firmwide email, Karp called the executive order an “existential crisis” that “could easily have destroyed our firm.” This dire talk of imminent firm collapse is “absurd,” a former senior Paul Weiss attorney told me. The likeliest consequence of pushing back on Trump was a modest cut to partners’ bloated paychecks. But that risk was enough to justify Karp’s Faustian bargain. “With this behind us,” he said, “we can devote our complete focus—as we always do—to our clients, our work, our colleagues and our firm.” His words echo the delusions Albert Camus diagnosed in The Plague: “They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.” At any moment, a mercurial strongman can revoke his fleeting reprieve, and the firm’s supplication only strengthens his hand if he does so. Far from escaping the pestilence, Paul Weiss strengthened a pathogen from which it has no immunity, and it is now poised to infect others.

Ironically, Karp’s transactional approach to authoritarianism undermines Paul Weiss’s long-term profitability. By transforming a once-respected institution into a symbol of capitulation, Karp has set off serious recruitment and retention issues among both principled and risk-averse associates. As George Conway, a conservative attorney and former Big Law partner, noted, Paul Weiss lawyers “who don’t promptly resign will defile their moral and professional reputations beyond repair.” Beyond losing legal talent, the firm’s compromised reputation raises legitimate questions about its ability to provide zealous advocacy when faced with pressure or adversity—a concern that will inevitably influence current and prospective client decisions.

There’s a larger point about autocracy and capital. Karp’s conviction that one can negotiate with fascism, can placate it, can continue business as usual in its shadow, runs counter to history. The collapse of the rule of law is not just bad for the vulnerable; it risks disaster for the machinery of mercenary commerce that has made Karp and other Paul Weiss partners extravagantly wealthy. No firm can thrive for long in a system where the retributive whims of one man dictate who can practice law.

Twelve minutes after announcing Paul Weiss’s surrender on social media, Trump returned to lambasting “Radical Left Judges,” decrying these “Lunatics” for “very dangerous and incorrect Decisions” causing the “destruction of our Country!” One imagines Karp, fresh from his presidential prostration, scrolling through this presidential jeremiad with a sinking feeling. Or perhaps not. The architects of appeasement rarely realize they will be devoured by the very forces they try to subjugate.

One would have hoped Big Law firms would rally around their peers caught in Trump’s vindictive maw. The president is not just attacking individual firms but their profession’s autonomy and the basic principles of the legal system. Law firms could have coordinated to overcome a collective action problem, presenting a unified legal challenge impregnable to a single executive order and shunning the administration lawyers partaking in these abuses. Before Karp debased himself, he was apparently trying to build such a coalition, urging other firms to sign a friend-of-the-court brief defending Perkins Coie.

The actual response from most of the richest law firms has been deafening silence. Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block all stood up to executive orders targeting them. Three large firms—Williams & Connolly; Munger, Tolles & Olson; and Cooley—have shown some courage, representing and organizing support for the targeted firms. Meanwhile, two Republican-aligned firms—Sullivan & Cromwell and Jones Day—have remained in good favor with Trump. A third, Skadden, entered into a preemptive deal on Friday, pledging $100 million in free legal work and changing a range of its internal policies, and similar deals were subsequently made with two additional firms, Milbank and Willkie Farr & Gallagher. The vast majority of firms have chosen calculated inaction, treating this authoritarian offensive not as an existential threat to the profession and rule of law but as a business risk to be managed—or, more cynically, as a competitive opportunity to exploit.

While Big Law partners fret and fiddle, Trump’s aides have rejoiced, celebrating the cudgel Karp has given them. They’ve wasted no time wielding it. Two days after meeting Karp, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to inform the White House of “frivolous” lawsuits brought by “Big Law pro bono practices” and pursue sanctions and disciplinary actions against them when warranted, especially if they resist its draconian immigration policies—creating a pretext for further punitive executive orders against lawyers who dissent from the regime. The White House boasts about holding “major law firms accountable, including Covington & Burling, Paul Weiss, and Perkins Coie;” last week Trump bragged that the firms are “bending” and “there’s more coming.”

Trump knows that he can’t lose in court if there’s no one to oppose him. So far, many major law firms seem inclined to go along. About two dozen Big Law firms that joined or led lawsuits against Trump’s excesses in his first term have not yet participated in litigation against the second term’s grave constitutional affronts. With each firm that bows out of the legal resistance, Trump faces fewer obstacles in court, fewer constraints on his authoritarian aspirations.

Yet Trump is wrong if he thinks he can cow the entire legal profession. He can intimidate lawyers who prioritize profit over principle, but not all of the bar is like Karp. Beleaguered public interest attorneys will continue the fight. “The Trump Administration wants to recruit the nation’s top litigators to dismantle the rule of law and put immigrants’ lives at risk, or at least stop them from pushing back,” Rachel Cohen, a third-year associate at Skadden who quit to protest her firm’s complicity through silence before it cut a deal with Trump, told me. “There is nothing that [Skadden] could have said to make me go along with that.”

There are still lawyers who find fascism every bit as horrible as it is. Their burden is now heavier, the resources at their disposal more limited, and the odds against them steeper—yet they will persist, or at least try to in America’s rapid democratic backsliding. The legal resistance has not disappeared; it’s just a lot lonelier now.

Duncan Hosie is a legal scholar and the Steven M. Polan Fellow in Constitutional Law and History at the Brennan Center at the NYU School of Law.