My daughter Pollyanna called this morning to cheer me up. She made some good points. Here are five of them.
First, collective action by Paul Weiss and other large corporate law firms is not necessary to save the rule of law, nor is it sufficient to save the rule of law in the United States.
It isn’t necessary because the issues are clear as day, and the deficiencies in Trump’s position are well known to the federal judiciary. (For further information see the opinions and other filings in Perkins Coie v. Dep’t of Justice as well as a variety of background materials available on the Perkins Coie website.
Nor is it sufficient. Survival of the rule of law requires, first of all, resolute action by the federal judiciary generally and by at least five Supreme Court justices in particular, and then, secondly, widespread support on the public’s part for resistance to tyranny. That alone will suffice.
Second, to the extent that specialized legal learning about the constitutional case law is needed to defend the rule of law, the big law firms largely do not have that expertise. They know a lot about securities law, environmental law, tax law, antitrust law, and intellectual property law.
Constitutional law, not so much.
Third, while it’s regrettable that Paul Weiss temporized, that’s not at all surprising. That’s what generally happens when someone is faced with a new and unexpected situation, with strong incentives pulling in wildly different directions.
But, fourth, the situation remains fluid.
Paul Weiss and its peers are in the business of hiring junior lawyers with sterling credentials—Harvard Law Review and the like—paying them very large salaries, and parceling out their time, hour by hour, at $1,000 or more, for services rendered to gigantic corporations.
Apparently, a good portion of corporate America is still sleep walking, looking to the Trump administration for those sweet, sweet tax cuts and deregulatory policies, and still imagining that his talk about tariffs and invading Canada, etc., is all bullshit.
Paul Weiss as we know it cannot exist without a lot of corporate clients paying it $2.6 billion a year.
On the other hand, Paul Weiss as we know it cannot exist without a continuing supply of very able young lawyers. A lot of them are very upset indeed. And, I would bet good money, a fair number of the partners are not happy, either.
Fifth and finally, if you look closely at what Paul Weiss actually “agreed” to do, it looks like Trump did not get very much apart from headlines along the lines of “Big Law Firm Capitulates.”
The firm “agreed” to supply $40 million in legal services—not money, but the “value” of the legal services—to pro bono clients as mutually agreed between Trump and the firm. $40 million is 1/65 of the firm’s annual earnings. And the firm is “paying,” not in cash, but in services.
Back of the envelope calculation: If the contributed pro bono services are “worth” on average, say, $1300 per hour, then the $40 million figure works out to 30,769 hours per year. If Paul Weiss’s 1200 lawyers bill on average 2,000 hours/year to their paying clients—and that may be low—then, collectively, they’re billing 2.4 million hours. The promised Trump pro bono 30,769 hours represent 1/78 of the estimated total current billable hours.
Chicken feed.
The firm also “agreed” not to turn away business based on the prospective client’s political affiliation. Fine. They probably shouldn’t do that anyway.
And the firm seems to have discussed with Trump having some sort of a look-see about its employment practices.
I just looked. The firm’s “inclusion page” is still up.
In short, the firm’s “obligations” seem trivial, ambiguous, and, to a significant degree, illusory. I’ll bet Mr. Karp of Paul Weiss walked out of his meeting last week with Trump thinking that he had just yanked the wool over Orange Mussolini’s eyes, good and proper.
This week, though, things probably look more complicated.
Facing MAGA 