BigLaw Is Always a Business First

[In It to Win It]

Balls and Strikes

Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced a sweeping executive order targeting the law firm of Paul Weiss, which, the White House says, has “played an outsized role…in the destruction of bedrock American principles.” The order directed agency heads to terminate any contracts with “entities that disclose doing business with Paul Weiss,” thus subjecting the firm’s clients to the threat of forevermore losing the government’s business unless they decided to hire different lawyers instead. In a firmwide email, Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp described the order as an “existential threat” that “could easily have destroyed” the firm.

According to The New York Times, also contributing to the sense of impending doom at Paul Weiss were Paul Weiss’s competitors, including Sullivan & Cromwell and Kirkland & Ellis, who quietly approached the firm’s top lawyers and asked if, under the unfortunate circumstances, they were interested in leaving and bringing their multimillion-dollar books of business along with them. Karp, as fearful of losing big-name talent as he was of hemorrhaging clients, hastily struck a deal with the White House: In a post on Truth Social, Trump announced that he’d agreed to revoke the order in exchange for, among other promises, Paul Weiss’s commitments to “not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies,” and to donate “the equivalent of $40 million in pro bono legal services” to “support the Administration’s initiatives.” When your dignity is already part of the ransom you’ve agreed to pay, that’s a hell of a premium to add to the top of it.

On the record, both Kirkland and Sullivan & Cromwell—and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, which the Times says “also mulled” whether to poach Paul Weiss lawyers—denied trying to do so, which is probably what I would say if a Times reporter were to call and ask whether my firm tried to leverage creeping authoritarianism by attempting to climb a few spots in the profits per partner rankings. But in an industry this competitive, trying to lure splashy names from vulnerable rivals is always part of the game, whatever the cause of that vulnerability may be. Any firm reading about Trump’s vendetta against Paul Weiss would be foolish not to place a few calls, or at the very, to least start an internal email chain with some high-priority names on it.

Right now, there is a lot of understandable consternation among many lawyers about the need for The Legal Profession to respond to the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle it. By my count, Paul Weiss is the fifth firm to get name-checked in an executive order, and although the order indeed gestured at firm’s diversity initiatives, the real source of Trump’s ire is Mark Pomerantz, a former Paul Weiss lawyer who went on to work on the New York state prosecution of Trump for making illegal hush money payments. The most recent order, which targets Jenner & Block, was also prompted by the firm’s previous employment of a former prosecutor whom Trump doesn’t like. The attacks are only going to get more vindictive and unhinged from here, especially now that Trump has seen that immediate capitulation is a realistic outcome. If the profession doesn’t respond in a meaningful way, it might soon be unable to do so.