President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against the country’s elite law firms has sent shock waves through Washington. Defenders of the effort say that’s a good thing.
Trump’s threatened or actual executive orders stripping Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Paul Weiss, and other firms of government access, absent pledges from the firms to devote resources to cases deemed acceptable by the Trump administration, have drawn fierce criticism from much of the legal community. Critics label the moves as retaliation for the firms’ work with Trump’s political opponents and raise concerns that the orders could create a chilling effect for clients seeking representation.
But proponents of the orders say the pushback against an industry that has become overwhelmingly liberal and increasingly weaponized against conservative causes is long overdue.
“People have been condemning Donald Trump for going after law firms,” Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told the Washington Examiner. “It’s as if Donald Trump began this — he didn’t.”
Trump “was responding to this lawfare … this misuse of the legal system, misuse of bar associations,” Dershowitz added.
The American Bar Association has spoken out against Trump’s targeting of law firms, calling it an attempt “to remake the legal profession into something that rewards those who agree with the government and punishes those who do not.” It did not, however, speak out when lawyers who represented Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election faced disbarment and criminal charges for their work.
And some in the legal community now see Trump’s anti-Big Law orders as part of a necessary course correction after several years of one-sided lawfare.
“To paraphrase Scott Adams, we’re experiencing two movies on one screen,” Darrell White, founding partner at Kimura London & White, told the Washington Examiner. “To conservatives, the record of political persecutions by the prior Department of Justice is clear. President Trump’s attempts to rein in those that participated makes sense. To the Left, the grandmas parading through the Capitol deserve jail time, and orange-man-bad is back to his old ways.”
Equal representation from an unequal industry
Critics argue that Trump’s executive orders targeting major law firms threaten the principle of equal representation.
Trump’s effort “undermines our profession’s commitment to ensure representation for all,” hundreds of associates at major law firms argued in an open letter protesting the Trump administration’s orders and Big Law’s willingness to make deals with the president.
But the agreements that the government and Big Law have struck thus far have actually included pledges to provide the equal representation that the Trump administration and its defenders say Big Law had been denying to conservative clients.
“In my experience, Big Law follows a similar ideological spectrum to academia,” White said. “Those that lean right, or are openly Republican, keep their beliefs to themselves. To speak out in support of conservative causes or ideals spells career suicide. How could one argue no political bias exists in that environment? How can we have equal representation?”
Agreements between the Trump administration and the Big Law firms include a provision mandating that the firms “will not deny representation to clients, such as members of politically disenfranchised groups, who have not historically received legal representation from major National Law Firms … because of the personal political views of individual lawyers.”
That language appears in multiple settlement announcements, including those with Skadden, Milbank, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher. The Paul Weiss agreement, while omitting the “politically disenfranchised groups” language, includes a similar provision about viewpoint neutrality and case intake standards.
The four years of legal battles involving defendants accused of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot deepened the mistrust between Big Law firms and Trump’s allies.
Many Jan. 6 defendants struggled to find legal counsel in the face of aggressive prosecution by former President Joe Biden’s Justice Department. While some small firms and solo practitioners stepped in to defend the accused rioters, the nation’s top law firms largely kept their distance — despite having previously represented detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other highly controversial clients.
To some in the legal world, that disparity says everything.
“That’s absolutely the case,” said Bill Bock, former general counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and attorney for several conservative clients. “Big Law has tended to be completely captured by the Left. They represent big businesses, and many of those businesses figured out that if they take a leftist-leaning approach, whether it’s on climate change, vaccines, or canceling anyone who supported President Trump, they’ll get a pass on everything else.”
Bock said that dynamic, along with ideological conformity inside elite law schools, has created a legal culture in which political views can dictate professional opportunities.
“It’s facilitated and accelerated this shift to the left in both business and law,” Bock said. “And it feeds on itself — to the point where people are afraid to speak the truth because they’re afraid it will cost them their jobs.”
Even one of the most respected conservative lawyers in the country experienced firsthand the consequences of progressivism’s dominance in Big Law.
Paul Clement, who served as solicitor general under former President George W. Bush, was forced to resign from Kirkland & Ellis in 2022 after successfully challenging a New York gun control law. Despite winning the case before the Supreme Court and setting a major precedent expanding gun rights nationwide, firm leaders told Clement he had to drop the client or leave the firm.
“Our adversarial system of justice depends on the representation of controversial clients, no matter which side has most of BigLaw rooting for it,” Clement wrote in a 2022 op-ed about his ouster.
Despite his experience, Clement is representing the law firm WilmerHale in a lawsuit filed on March 28 challenging Trump’s executive order against the firm.
Trump lawyers targeted
Democrats and institutions aligned with Big Law, such as the American Bar Association, went after lawyers who represented Trump in the lawsuits he filed after the 2020 election. The punishments sought for Trump-aligned lawyers went far beyond what Trump is now threatening Big Law with, proponents say — the Trump lawyers faced professional blacklisting, disbarment, and even criminal charges.
Critics say lawyers at the country’s biggest law firms did not step up during the coordinated retribution campaign against Trump’s former legal team.
“Team Biden made it very difficult for Trump attorneys to go to Big Law,” Mike Davis, a staunch Trump ally and founder of the conservative legal Article III Project, said in late March. “Then, Big Law colluded with Team Biden to take out Trump.”
Davis was likely referring in part to the support that Covington & Burling, one of the white-shoe law firms targeted by Trump, provided to then-special counsel Jack Smith as Smith attempted to prosecute Trump in two separate criminal cases ahead of the 2024 election.
In addition, the left-leaning 65 Project aimed to deter efforts to challenge election results by targeting lawyers who supported Trump’s 2020 election challenges. The anti-Trump campaign used ads, disbarment threats, and changes to American Bar Association rules during the Biden administration to go after lawyers linked to Trump’s 2020 election challenges.
In 2022, during the Biden administration, leaders of the 65 Project said they would push to change rules of professional conduct in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in an effort to curb what they called “malicious lawsuits” challenging the 2020 election results. Trump’s allies said the initiative was a thinly veiled attempt to punish lawyers for representing Trump or his associates. They warned that the proposed rule changes could lead to politically motivated disciplinary action against attorneys who took on election-related cases in the future.
Even some critics of Trump’s anti-Big Law campaign have acknowledged that the success of efforts such as the 65 Project is critical context for what the president is doing now.
“Trump is sending a message: Don’t tell me about due process and the First Amendment, not after Democrats for years threw due process out the window, systematically suppressed speech online, and sought to bankrupt and lock up the leading Republican presidential candidate through unconstitutional prosecutions,” Jed Rubenfield, a professor at Yale Law School, wrote in a recent piece for the Free Press that was critical of Trump’s attacks on Big Law.
“Of course, two wrongs do not make a right,” Rubenfeld wrote. “But it’s important to see what things look like to supporters of the president. Imagine you’re playing in an NFL game and the other team keeps tackling your receivers when the ball is still in the air and the refs never call pass interference. What are you supposed to do when you’re on defense—abide by the rules when the other team doesn’t? If you do, you’re going to lose.”
Profits versus principles
Critics of Trump’s moves have expressed nearly equal outrage about the decision by some firms to reach agreements with the administration. They accuse the firms of displaying cowardice in the face of unconstitutional threats from the president.
The real reason for the deals may be more straightforward.
“BigLaw firms do tend to represent liberal causes in the pro bono work they do, but it’s a small fraction of the legal services they provide,” former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told the Washington Examiner. “They’re businesses, like any other company, and they provide services to the highest bidder, whether it’s an oil company, tobacco company, or another entity. The pro bono work they do on behalf of liberal organizations is part of a public relations play because the firms are really corporate shills.”
While that liberal pro bono work was good for business during the Biden administration, Trump’s orders have ensured that is no longer the case.
Some firms may simply be responding to the changing business incentives associated with focusing primarily on progressive causes. Like other corporations ditching DEI policies and ending support for pride events, Big Law firms could be recognizing that Trump’s pressure campaign could have meaningful effects on their profit margins.
Perkins Coie reported in court filings that approximately 25% of its revenue comes from work with government clients, warning that it would suffer a significant financial impact if Trump’s executive order against it is enforced. Similarly, Paul Weiss has faced client departures as a result of the administration’s actions, reflecting broader concerns within Big Law about the economic ramifications of the pressure campaign.
“The bottom line is that large law firms exist to make money — ideally lots of it — and they are generally not paragons of virtue, principle or self-sacrifice,” Ankush Khardori, a former prosecutor and Big Law attorney, wrote in Politico earlier this month.
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Dedicating pro bono resources to liberal causes served another business need for the biggest firms, Rahmani said. Law firms competing for top talent at elite law schools could promise young lawyers, many of whom are liberal themselves, that they could pursue causes they care about in addition to the corporate work they’d be asked to do if they accepted job offers.
“Supporting liberal causes was good for their reputation and recruiting law students who want to help ordinary people, not just corporations,” Rahmani said. “Now that Trump’s executive orders are bad for business, many firms are willing to do a 180 because, at the end of the day, all they care about is profits (per partner) over people.”