On Friday, five more Big Law firms capitulated to President Donald Trump’s demands, committing to provide a total of $600 million in “pro bono” legal services to causes aligned with the president’s “conservative ideals.” All told, the world’s largest firms now have put nearly $1 billion in legal firepower at Trump’s disposal—a parade of obeisance that began back in March with Paul Weiss. At that time, many in the legal community were shocked. The firm, which claimed in 2016 that its “secret sauce” was a refusal “to sacrifice culture and values in favor of the bottom line,” is dominated by Democratic Party heavyweights, with partners including former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch; Senator Chuck Schumer’s brother, Robert Schumer; and Karen Dunn, who led debate prep for both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. How could Paul Weiss agree to help Trump’s assault on democracy?
But this isn’t a story of corporate law firms breaking an honorable tradition of upholding the rule of law. It’s a story of Big Law showing its true colors.
I wasn’t surprised by Paul Weiss’s acquiescence to Trump, and neither were many of my Harvard Law School classmates, who joined together years ago to protest a series of Paul Weiss recruitment galas at law schools around the country. We were calling out the firm’s “blatantly obstructionist” work (as the Massachusetts attorney general called it) shielding ExxonMobil from accountability for its campaign to defraud the public about climate change—work that included the frequent use of SLAPP suits designed to censor, intimidate, and silence ExxonMobil’s opponents. But there were other, equally appalling examples of malfeasance by Paul Weiss that we could have been demonstrating against. The firm helped to win immunity for the Sackler family for their role in creating the nation’s opioid crisis, defended Big Tobacco giant Philip Morris in the racketeering case U.S. v. Philip Morris, fought for many of Wall Street’s most notorious criminals, shielded the NFL against its concussed players, helped subprime lenders evade liability for the housing foreclosure crisis, and represented the creditors holding Puerto Rico hostage.
Paul Weiss is not unique in this regard; the exact same story can be told about every other Big Law firm now joining Trump’s fascist front. Many Democrats expressed outrage when Neal Katyal’s firm, Milbank, committed $100 million in free legal services to the president’s authoritarian ventures, despite the image of Katyal—a former acting solicitor general under President Obama and legal analyst for MSNBC—as a self-proclaimed leader of the #Resistance. But the reality is that Katyal already had a record representing monstrous causes. This is the guy who, in order to win immunity for U.S. corporations that abetted child slavery, cited as a worthy legal precedent the failure of Nuremberg prosecutors to prosecute “the firm that supplied Zyklon B gas, which the Nazis used to kill millions.”
When criticized for this kind of work, corporate lawyers inevitably fall back on the same defense—that “everyone deserves a lawyer.” Big Law partners regularly compare themselves to John Adams, who in 1770 risked his reputation and livelihood to represent the British soldiers charged with firing on colonists in the Boston Massacre. In his old age, Adams called this defense “one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.” Many corporate lawyers cast their advocacy for massive corporations in the same light.
Of course, many in our country do regularly find themselves in desperate need of a lawyer: A 2017 study found that low-income Americans reported receiving inadequate or no legal help for 86 percent of their civil legal problems. In the midst of this genuine crisis, which forces millions of Americans to face life-changing judicial consequences without any professional representation, hearing millionaire lawyers use this principle to justify working for the most powerful and well-represented entities on the planet feels like a sick joke.
To be clear, my argument is not that Big Law firms like Paul Weiss, Milbank, Wilkie Farr & Gallagher (where former second gentleman Doug Emhoff is a partner), Skadden, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, A&O Shearman, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft are evil institutions. The point is that by repeatedly weaponizing their vast legal firepower to ensure corporations and billionaires avoid accountability for their immensely destructive conduct, these firms were already perverting the rule of law before they began debasing themselves to the Trump regime. A legal system in which justice is largely for sale to the richest and most powerful is already a destabilized one, and this foments a distrust in institutions that empowers authoritarian charlatans like Trump.
The problem, then, is not just that Democratically dominated law firms are now bending the knee to the president. It’s that the Democratic Party has for so long been dominated by elites whose project of corporate lawlessness paved the way for Trump in the first place.
I do appreciate the minority of Big Law firms that so far have refused to cave to Trump. And the same goes for the individual lawyers who have resigned in protest after their firms capitulated, such as Paul Weiss’s top pro bono leader. But these folks aren’t heroes. They deserve credit, but they made the choice to join Big Law in the first place. After graduating from elite law schools, they could have made a livable salary doing good work for the world, or a comfortable salary doing neutral work. Instead, they chose to get rich at the expense of a better society.
This is all that Big Law stands for: an industry of mercenary elites from both parties sacrificing everything—justice, democracy, a livable future—for their own venal wealth. If there’s one silver lining from this sordid saga with Trump, it’s that the mask is off, and we can all see these parasitic firms for what they really are.