The Wall Street Journal sums it up:
President Trump took a broad swing at the [legal] industry Friday night after three earlier orders punishing Paul Weiss and two other firms. In a presidential memorandum, he broadly accused law firms of abusing the legal system to challenge his policies, stymie immigration enforcement and pursue partisan causes. He instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek sanctions in court against lawyers and firms who engage in “frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation.”
Trump also directed Bondi to launch a broad review of conduct by lawyers in litigation against the government over the last eight years to determine whether additional firms should face the same type of punishments he has issued already, most notably the termination of government contracts held by firm clients.
Administration officials already have built a list of more than a dozen law firms they might target with executive orders, and Trump has expressed eagerness in signing more of them, according to people familiar with the planning.
Trump’s latest pronouncement landed particularly hard in an industry that was still processing Paul Weiss’s decision to cut a deal with the White House rather than challenge the administration in court. Trump on Thursday rescinded his order against the firm after it agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services to support the administration’s initiatives, such as assisting veterans and fighting antisemitism.
Several law-firm chairs and senior partners said they were working to calm clients and employees, with younger associates increasingly calling for lawyers to take a stand against Trump. Some firm leaders said their clients—and their fellow partners—were split on whether they would rather their firms take a deal if targeted or fight it out in court. A number of firms were trying to draw distinctions to clients between their work and the activities of the firms that Trump has punished already. Corporate lawyers with a connection to the Trump administration have been tapped to open communication lines with the White House, and several firms were seeking to engage lobbyists, people familiar with the discussions said.
Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp spoke with other firms’ leaders in recent days and told them he found the deal with the White House distasteful but said he had little choice but to take it, according to people familiar with those conversations.
“Clients had told us that they were not going to be able to stay with us, even though they wanted to,” Karp told firm lawyers and employees in an internal email Sunday viewed by the Journal. “It was very likely that our firm would not be able to survive a protracted dispute with the Administration.”
One firm, Perkins Coie, which was hit with a Trump executive order on March 6, continued to lead the fight against the administration over the weekend.
“Now more than ever law firms and lawyers across the political spectrum have to stand up for our timeless values,” David Perez, a Perkins Coie partner said on LinkedIn. The Paul Weiss agreement, he said, emboldened Trump “to ratchet up his attack on one of the strongest checks on his power: lawyers and the rule of law.”
Perkins Coie sued the administration on March 11 and won a restraining order against the administration, with a judge saying the executive order was likely unconstitutional. But while the firm is winning in court, it is struggling to manage the fallout behind the scenes.
Perkins is losing clients who fear Trump’s wrath, and a number of top companies that work with the firm have called other firms about representation, people familiar with the matter said. One of the people said some competing lawyers have made sympathetic calls to Perkins to say they aren’t trying to steal the firm’s clients and would step aside if those clients wanted to return to Perkins after the situation calmed down.
An effort across a number of firms to file a court brief in support of Perkins continues to flounder because not enough firms are willing to sign it, for fear of antagonizing the administration, people familiar with those negotiations said.
While many industry leaders have been reluctant to speak publicly against the administration, that began to shift after Trump’s Friday memorandum.
San Francisco-based Keker, Van Nest & Peters urged law firm leaders “to resist the administration’s erosion of the rule of law.”
“Our liberties depend on lawyers’ willingness to represent unpopular people and causes, including in matters adverse to the federal government,” the firm said. “An attack on lawyers who perform this work is inexcusable and despicable.”
Trump’s campaign in part has been focused on paying back opponents. Perkins, for example, worked with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and an opposition-research firm that compiled a discredited dossier against Trump. Covington & Burling, another firm hit with an executive order, provided legal counsel to former special counsel Jack Smith. And Trump cited Paul Weiss’s previous ties to Mark Pomerantz, who also worked on the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Trump and his business.
But the president’s Friday memorandum also signaled Trump’s broader frustrations with lawyers challenging his initiatives in court—and winning. His administration is currently locked in a showdown with a Washington federal judge over Trump’s invocation of wartime powers to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members. A number of the president’s other initiatives have been put on hold by the courts, including the termination of thousands of government employees and limits on birthright citizenship and transgender rights.
Public-interest legal organizations and smaller firms have been leading many of those cases.
Sid Davidoff, a New York lawyer who was famously on President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” said industry leaders were caving to pressure.
“You have some top notch firms, significant legal minds, and they’re just being whipped,” Davidoff said. “I guess they are trying to protect their bottom line, but it’s really upsetting.”
Facing MAGA 