Paul Weiss Got Played

But defending the integrity of the legal profession is not a game.

President Trump is the undisputed king of the trollsuit. In the four years he was out of office, he filed a raft of crap complaints against the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Twitter, Meta, YouTube, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Michael Cohen.

At the moment, he’s is personally suing the Pulitzer Prize board in Okeechobee County, Florida for defamatory refusal to retract prizes awarded in 2018 to the New York Times and Washington Post. His presidential campaign is suing CBS in Texas for editing video, which he calls a violation of the state’s consumer protection law. His media company is suing a Brazilian judge in Florida for ordering the rightwing streaming platform Rumble offline in Brazil. And he’s fighting $1 million in sanctions after suing Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and half of DC for doing THE RICO to him in 2016.

And so it’s more than a little ironic that he’s lobbing accusations that “biglaw” firms are “undermining the judicial process and in the destruction of bedrock American principles” by filing garbage lawsuits.

Over the past three weeks, the Fat Elvis revenge tour has targeted lawyers who “threaten national security” by pissing Trump off. First he went after Covington & Burling, canceling lawyers’ security clearances for the sin of providing a few hours of pro bono advice to former Special Counsel Jack Smith. The firm opted to play dead and, according to the New York Times, entered into “discussions with other prominent law firms with fewer ties to Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies about becoming the face of some of their most important cases before the Justice Department.”

Next the president came after Perkins Coie, purporting to bar its clients from doing business with the federal government as punishment for its prior association with Hillary Clinton and the DNC. That’s a death penalty for any major law firm, since virtually every big company in America does business with the government. Judge Beryl Howell quickly enjoined enforcement of the executive order, which should have stiffened the spines of other biglaw firms.

It did not.

Instead, when Trump came after Paul Weiss, another 1,000+ lawyer firm with strong Democratic ties, its managing partner Brad Karp prostrated himself in the Oval Office. The firm agreed to do $40 million of pro bono work in accord with the president’s “priorities.” Whether that means writing amicus briefs supporting an end to birthright citizenship or representing Libs of TikTok gratis is left as an exercise for the reader.

“To be clear, and to clarify misinformation perpetuated from various media sources, the Administration is not dictating what matters we take on, approving our matters, or anything like that,” Karp insisted in an all-staff email published by legal commentator David Lat. “We obviously would not, and could not ethically, have agreed to that.”

Whatever the intent, the surrender left the president free to take an extended victory lap on Truth Social.

The Times reports that this is not what Karp agreed to either — the language about “DEI” and the attack on Paul Weiss alum Mark Pomerantz, who helped Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg prosecute Trump, wasn’t in the original agreement.

In his email, Karp called the executive order “an unprecedented threat” and “an existential crisis” that “could easily have destroyed our firm.” After whining that other major law firms hadn’t rallied behind his shop — something which Paul Weiss failed to do when it was Perkins Coie in the crosshairs! — Karp explained that he had no choice but to knuckle under:

We initially prepared to challenge the executive order in court, and a team of Paul, Weiss attorneys prepared a lawsuit in the finest traditions of the firm. But it became clear that, even if we were successful in initially enjoining the executive order in litigation, it would not solve the fundamental problem, which was that clients perceived our firm as being persona non grata with the Administration. We could prevent the executive order from taking effect, but we couldn’t erase it. Clients had told us that they were not going to be able to stay with us, even though they wanted to. It was very likely that our firm would not be able to survive a protracted dispute with the Administration.

And perhaps as a matter of pure practicality, he’s right. The perception that the law firm was out of favor with the regime could have been disastrous, even if the executive order was enjoined. But lawyers are not pure businessmen — we don’t make widgets. We have a duty to uphold the integrity of the profession. And this ain’t it.

Lawyers and judges are being deliberately targeted by the Trump administration. Line prosecutors who worked on the January 6 cases are not only being fired en masse, they’re facing investigation by the US Attorneys Offices where they once served. The president is weaponizing the security clearance process, even as he decries the so-called “weaponization” of the Justice Department under his predecessor. Last week, the acting chair of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Andrea Lucas, sent letters to 20 major law firms interrogating them about their “DEI” practices. Career prosecutors are being forced out because they won’t sign their name to unethical, bullshit investigations. And the judiciary is facing rightwing trollstorms so dangerous that they actually roused Chief Justice John Roberts from his self-satisfied torpor.

And Trump’s attacks on individual law firms are ratcheting up. After going after Covington’s security clearances, then Perkins Coie’s clients, the Paul Weiss EO zeroed in on the firm’s pro bono work.

Global law firms have for years played an outsized role in undermining the judicial process and in the destruction of bedrock American principles. Many have engaged in activities that make our communities less safe, increase burdens on local businesses, limit constitutional freedoms, and degrade the quality of American elections. Additionally, they have sometimes done so on behalf of clients, pro bono, or ostensibly “for the public good” — potentially depriving those who cannot otherwise afford the benefit of top legal talent the access to justice deserved by all. My Administration will no longer support taxpayer funds sponsoring such harm.

Trump seems to be suggesting that law firms have an obligation to diversify(!) their pro bono services to include conservative as well as liberal causes — a gross violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of association. This itself is an escalation from the Perkins Coie EO, which accused the firm of taking money from George Soros to “judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification.”

Literally anyone — and certainly an experienced lawyer like Brad Karp — could see where this was going. And on Friday night, it went there

In a presidential memorandum entitled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court,” Trump delivered a broadside against immigration lawyers writ large, and pro bono lawyers specifically.

“[T]he immigration bar, and powerful Big Law pro bono practices, frequently coach clients to conceal their past or lie about their circumstances when asserting their asylum claims, all in an attempt to circumvent immigration policies enacted to protect our national security and deceive the immigration authorities and courts into granting them undeserved relief,” he fulminated.

It’s hard to say whether that’s more preposterous or offensive — particularly in light of the fact that the president just renditioned hundreds of Venezuelans, many of whom had never been accused of any crime, to be tortured in a Salvadoran prison. In reality it’s almost impossible to successfully claim asylum in the United States. And there’s zero evidence that pro bono lawyers are coaching their clients to lie.

The memorandum instructs the Attorney General to take a series of adverse actions against “any attorney whose conduct in Federal court or before any component of the Federal Government appears to violate professional conduct rules, including rules governing meritorious claims and contentions, and particularly in cases that implicate national security, homeland security, public safety, or election integrity.” Rule 11 sanctions and attorney discipline proceedings would require the cooperation of judges and state bars, which seems fairly unlikely at this point. But the memo goes on to threaten government retribution in the form of canceled security clearances and contracts for law firms which have the temerity to sue the government.

After years of howling that the major social media platforms (which are not the government!) violated his First Amendment rights by deplatforming him, Trump is now punishing American law firms for suing the government, a core First Amendment activity.

“Lawyers abandon the profession’s highest ideals when they engage in partisan decision-making, and betray the ethical obligation to represent those who are unpopular or disfavored in a particular environment,” he blustered without a hint of irony.

George Orwell couldn’t write this shit. (And wouldn’t have.)

Karp’s insistence that “the resolution we reached with the Administration will have no effect on our work and our shared culture and values” would be comical if it weren’t so tragic. Good luck recruiting top notch associates to do the pro bono scut work, dude! And while it SUCKS that Paul Weiss was the firm that Trump happened to target, it was still an execrable failure for it to cave when the administration is trying to nuke the independence of the legal profession.

But this latest order, along with Paul Weiss’s ignominious retreat, may have finally jolted lawyers into action. Lawfare’s Anna Bower reports that the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olsen is preparing an amicus brief in the Perkins Coie case that several megafirms will be signing on to. Perhaps it’s finally dawned on them that, as Ben Franklin warned, “we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Franklin also famously said “A republic, if you can keep it.” That was in response to the question, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"

After 238 years, that question is alarmingly relevant again. And to have any chance of “keeping it,” the strongest among us are going to have to do more than surrender in advance to protect their short term bottom lines.