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President Trump has deployed aggressive, illegal tactics to divide powerful rivals and perceived enemies, so that they can not align in solidarity and resist his authoritarian seizure of power.
His three most obvious targets are individual blue states, individual universities, and individual law firms. One by one, they have rewarded his abuses of power by caving. But the most craven actors are in the realm of corporate law, where even firms that Trump has not singled out are abandoning people in need of representation in order to escape his ire.
A Tuesday Washington Post story [ [link removed] ] details the snowballing consequences of one egregious capitulation. When Donald Trump issued a lawless order instructing the government to crack down on the white-shoe law firm Paul Weiss, the firm’s chairman Brad Karp cut a corrupt deal with the president, including a promise to devote $40 million worth of pro bono hours “to support the administration’s initiatives.”
The decision had an immediate emboldening effect on Trump and chilling effect on the rest of the Big Law world. Trump signed a new executive order Tuesday [ [link removed] ] targeting the firm Jenner & Block. He ordered his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to seek sanctions against any lawyers who file lawsuits he and his administration deem “frivolous.” Most other firms have responded to Trump’s implicit threat to strip them of their security clearances and drive away clients with business before the government by going to ground—abandoning clients that want to sue the administration, or that the administration might otherwise find objectionable.
Suddenly, litigants who need to defend themselves against Trump’s threats or file suit to stop his legally dubious orders, “are struggling to find legal representation as a result of his challenges,” according to the Post. “Biden-era officials said they’re having trouble finding lawyers willing to defend them. The volunteers and small nonprofits forming the ground troops of the legal resistance to Trump administration actions say that the well-resourced law firms that once would have backed them are now steering clear.”
That’s bad enough. But in context, its even worse. White shoe pro bono work is in exceptionally high demand because, through his lawlessness, Trump has already taxed the world of public interest, legal aid, and boutique firms to its limit. Before his first orders, which targeted corporate firms Covington & Burling, and Perkins Coie, lawyers for these independent firms and civil-society organizations were already cracking under the workload.
“Two months into this administration, the American legal system is already under severe stress,” said Deepak Gupta, a Supreme Court advocate whose firm Gupta Wessler has participated in litigation against the Trump administration. “The nation's largest, richest, and most powerful corporate law firms are starting to be ruled by abject fear. They're already categorically declining to take on new pro bono clients in cases that might draw the administration's ire. Worse still, in some cases I know of, they're backing out of existing commitments to challenge unlawful government actions on behalf of vulnerable groups that desperately need their help. Nonprofits and smaller law firms like ours simply cannot make up for all of that unmet need.”
This trend extends further, to certain paying clients, who suddenly find themselves abandoned by their lawyers, too. And if your blood is only simmering, this should bring it to a boil: For as long as they have existed, these white-shoe firms and their star lawyers, have willingly defended unsavory interests from allegations of serious wrongdoing. Invariably, they come in for criticism for representing bad actors, and just as invariably they fall back on the same trite excuse—that everyone is entitled to vigorous representation, even the very rich. They say this knowing that all of their elite-law peers will ride to their defense.
Now we know how seriously they took that supposed principle.
TAKE THE MONEY AND STUN
The Paul Weiss capitulation, and its knock-on effects, call to mind the famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” It’s on everyone’s lips. And yet they have shown deep reluctance to form an alliance.
Money is the biggest confounding factor here. ...
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