On Friday, March 14, President Donald Trump effectively delivered an extortion note to one of the biggest law firms in the world. The threat was styled as a “presidential action” titled “Addressing Risks from Paul Weiss,” a white-shoe law firm founded 150 years ago this year. The order directed agency heads to suspend Paul Weiss employees’ security clearances, making it impossible for the firm to effectively represent clients with business that requires clearance, and to “review” the government’s contracts with companies that do business with the firm—an unsubtle hint that people shouldn’t keep hiring Paul Weiss as their lawyers if they want to keep getting hired by the government.
By “risks” posed by Paul Weiss, Trump meant “political grievances.” One partner at the firm, Jeannie Rhee, worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference, as well as a lawsuit against the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for their role in the January 6 insurrection. A former Paul Weiss partner, Mark Pomerantz, investigated Trump as a special prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and concluded that Trump was “guilty of numerous felony violations.” And like basically every major law firm, Paul Weiss has implemented diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in an effort to make the legal profession’s whiteness marginally less blinding. Trump’s order presents these facts as proof that the firm engages in “blatant discrimination and other activities inconsistent with the interests of the United States.”
Basically, Paul Weiss made the mistakes of being affiliated with people who tried to hold Trump and his friends accountable, and publicly acknowledging the value of diversity in the workplace. So Trump wanted to make the firm pay.
A week after issuing his executive order, Trump announced that Paul Weiss had paid in full. According to Trump, he and Paul Weiss Chairman Brad Karp agreed that the White House would “withdraw” the order in exchange for Paul Weiss abandoning any diversity policies and undergoing a “comprehensive audit of its employment practices.” Trump also announced that Paul Weiss would provide “the equivalent of $40 million in pro bono legal services” to “support the Administration’s initiatives,” and had “acknowledged the wrongdoing” of Pomerantz. For what it’s worth, Paul Weiss’s internal version of the agreement looks a bit different: It does not include any affirmation that Paul Weiss “will not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies,” and it does not include any recognition of Pomerantz’s alleged wrongdoing.
Paul Weiss’s capitulation caused widespread outrage throughout the firm and the broader legal community. And on Sunday, March 23, Karp attempted to defend himself in a firmwide email, explaining that the executive order “brought the full weight of the government down on our firm, our people, and our clients” and “could easily have destroyed our firm.” Clients who “perceived our firm as being persona non grata with the Administration” were already fleeing Paul Weiss, he said, and “certain other firms” were already trying to poach Paul Weiss’s clients and employees. As Karp saw it, this was the only way for Paul Weiss to survive.
Karp also tried to assure the firm that the deal would “have no effect on our work and our shared culture and values.” But this defies the language and the logic of both the order and Trump’s subsequent post. If it were true that the negotiated settlement “would not require us to compromise our core values and fundamental principles,” as Karp said, the administration would not have agreed to it. The entire order is composed of compromises. Karp said “the Administration is not dictating what matters we take on, approving our matters, or anything like that.” But that is, again, exactly what the order and Trump’s post seek to do.
Karp at a fundraiser for The Morgan Library & Museum, November 2019 (Photo by Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
Since striking a deal with the firm, Trump has only escalated his attacks on lawyers and the rule of law. To date, Paul Weiss is the third law firm Trump has singled out by executive order. The day after Paul Weiss bent the knee, the Justice Department filed a motion to disqualify a federal district court judge who had blocked one of these orders, calling the judge “insufficiently impartial to adjudicate the meritless challenges” to the president’s agenda.
The day after that, Trump went further, publishing a memorandum titled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court,” which directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigations” against the federal government’s interests—in other words, to ask courts to penalize any lawyers with the audacity to represent a client opposing Trump’s policies. More than 20 civil rights organizations condemned the administration’s attempt to “prevent the legal system from operating as an independent check on government authority.” Paul Weiss, whose annual revenue last year was around $2.6 billion, could not be bothered to do anything of the sort.
Part of what makes Paul Weiss’s prostration so frustrating is that the firm presents itself as one of the good ones. Their website boasts about being the first integrated major law firm, with Black attorneys working alongside white attorneys and Jewish lawyers practicing alongside Gentiles. It brags about working with Thurgood Marshall on school desegregation and Edie Windsor on marriage equality, and providing free legal services to abortion providers and patients after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. “We always have been an open and diverse, iconoclastic, egalitarian firm with a conscience,” Karp said in a 2016 interview. In the very first sentence of its Statement of Firm Principles, published in 1963, the firm pledged to “in all things to govern ourselves as members of a free democratic society with responsibilities both to our profession and our country.”
That free democratic society is endangered by both Trump’s threat and Paul Weiss’s appeasement. As the differences between Trump’s and Karp’s statements about the details of their deal make clear, Trump is a habitual linestepper; there is no reason to think he will be satisfied with Paul Weiss’s agreement, and every reason to think he will demand more. Once you give a bully your lunch money, the bully doesn’t leave you alone. They just keep taking your lunch money.
By conscripting law firms to implement his priorities, Trump is seeking to neutralize any legal resistance to his administration and turn lawyers into instruments of fascism. By going along with this campaign, Paul Weiss lost its integrity, and gained nothing in return.
