Thoughts about Donald Trump’s efforts to make the legal profession bend the knee

As disturbing and problematic Donald Trump’s recent series of attacks on lawyers are, they are entirely predictable. With political leadership in the executive branch whose subservience to him that seemingly has no bounds and a Congress that has made itself compliant and irrelevant, the only thing standing between Trump and a complete takeover of the federal government is the legal system. So he is going after the lawyers who bring cases and their clients and the judges who decide them. He has an ongoing intimidation campaign against federal judges that will only intensify if the courts, especially the Supreme Court, rule against him. I will talk about that at a later time.

Today, I am talking about his recent efforts to go after law firms and lawyers. They reflect typical characteristics of a Trump attack. The man both desires and understands power as well as anybody and he knows that if he can substantially weaken the legal resistance to his actions, literally more power to him. In addition to power, he understands weakness and he is exploiting the vulnerabilities of “Big Law” firms and lawyers generally. Finally, he loves to settle scores, and he has many vendettas involving the legal profession both as an institution and as to particular individuals.

For somebody who is not a lawyer, the President knows a lot about lawyers and the legal system. His older sister Mary was a federal district court and circuit court judge for three decades. One of his mentors was the lawyer Roy Cohn, who Trump got to know when Cohn represented Trump in a housing discrimination case brought by the Department of Justice against he and his father in the early 1970s. Trump has litigated countless cases both as a plaintiff or defendant. Michael Cohen, his former “fixer,” is a lawyer. Even his Democratic opponents in his three Presidential elections were lawyers. Bonus points if you can identify the last Democrat in a Presidential general election who was not a lawyer – answer at the end.¹

In the last month, Trump has issued three presidential executive orders/memoranda where a particular law firm has been targeted each time followed by the memo issued last Saturday where he is weaponizing the federal government, particularly the Department of Justice, to go after firms, organizations, and entities that are challenging him in court. His first target was the law firm Covington & Burling LLP. Jack Smith, the former special counsel who had prosecuted Trump declared in a financial disclosure that he had received $140,000 in pro bono assistance from the firm. On February 25, Trump issued an executive order to nine agency heads suspending any active security clearances to the Covington lawyers and employees who represented Smith, and to evaluate any government contracts with Covington. This memo appear to have been a trial balloon.

When executive order did not appear to have much impact and there was not substantial opposition to it in the legal profession, Trump took it to the next level, his March 6 Presidential executive order addressed to Perkins Coie LLP. His grievances: (1) Perkins Coie, as counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election had hired Fusion GPS to investigate links between the Trump campaign and Russia; (2) Perkins Coie’s engagement on election and voting rights matters; (3) Perkins Coie’s alleged consideration of race in hiring. The first two issues are related to Trump’s vendetta against Marc Elias, who had left Perkins Coie, in 2021 to start his own firm. Even if there was any legitimacy to any of the grievances, the response was grossly disproportionate. Claiming that the firm’s actions are a threat to national security and other interests of the United States, the memoranda, amongst other things, orders agency heads to provide guidance “limiting official access from Federal Government buildings to employees of Perkins Coie when such access would threaten the national security of or otherwise be inconsistent with the interests of the United States” and “guidance limiting Government employees acting in their official capacity from engaging with Perkins Coie employees to ensure consistency with the national security and other interests of the United States.” Another set of provisions ordered agencies to examine “require[ing] Government contractors to disclose any business they do with Perkins Coie and whether that business is related to the subject of the Government contract,” and then “tak[ing] appropriate steps to terminate any [such contracts], to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law.” What this was designed to do is prevent Perkins Coie lawyers from having access to the federal courthouses or interacting with federal employees, including federal attorneys. Additionally, the executive order threatened Federal contractors who were clients or had other business relationships of Perkins Coie with loss of those contracts. These provisions, unless blocked, would likely destroy the firm.

Perkins Coie chose to fight this. A number of firms, presumably scared of being in Trump’s crosshairs, declined to represent the firm. Williams and Connolly stepped up and filed a lawsuit on Perkins Coie’s behalf. In the supporting papers, the firm set forth how much of its practice was predicated on interaction with the federal government and the fact that several clients had ended their relationship with the firm or were considering doing so. The district court has temporarily blocked implementation of the memorandum, saying at the hearing that the memorandum “casts a chilling harm of blizzard proportion across the entire legal profession.” The court found that the memorandum likely violates the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. The Justice Department has since filed a motion to have the judge recused because, according to DOJ, she is biased.

Trump kept going, The Paul Weiss firm was next in an executive order issued on March 14. Paul Weiss’s “transgressions” were that the firm brought a case on behalf of the District of Columbia against those behind the January 6 insurrection, that Paul Weiss had hired a lawyer (who had since left the firm) after the lawyer previously worked on developing a case against Trump when he worked for the Manhattan District Attorney, and that the firm’s DEI policies were discriminatory on the basis of race and sex. Its penalties were the same as Perkins Coie.

Though Paul Weiss considered the path taken by Perkins Coie, it decided to capitulate. On March 17, the firm and its client dropped the January 6 lawsuit. The firm’s managing partner, Brad Karp negotiated a deal with Trump that was announced by Trump on March 20. Oddly, there are some discrepancies between the document provided by Trump and the firm’s version what is agreed upon includes the following: (1) Paul Weiss “will engage experts, to be mutually agreed within 14 days, to conduct a comprehensive audit of all of its employment policies and (2) “Paul, Weiss will dedicate the equivalent of $40 million in pro bono legal services over the course of President Trump’s terms to support [initiatives assisting our Nation’s veterans, fairness [in the justice system], the President’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, and other mutually agreed projects.”

On March 23, Karp sent a lengthy email explanation to his Paul Weiss colleagues. The email is revealing in several respects. Karp stated that “[o]ur firm faced a moment of existential crisis. The executive order could have easily destroyed the firm.” It noted that the order “threatened our clients with the loss of their government contracts, and the loss of access to the government, if they continued to use the firm as their lawyers,” and that, as a result, “clients were considering leaving the firm.” Karp stated that Paul Weiss opted against litigation because “even if we were successful in initially enjoining the executive order in litigation, it would not solve the fundamental problem, which was that clients perceived our firm as being persona non grata with the Administration,” and that “[i]t was very likely that our firm would not be able to survive a protracted dispute with the Administration.” The letter that Paul Weiss had tried previously to rally the legal community in support of Covington and Perkins Coie without success. After the executive order was issued against Paul Weiss, the firm’s peers had not supported the firm but instead some of them “were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.” Karp also noted that the firm’s fiduciary duty to its 2,500 employees meant considering the effects on them if the firm did not reach an agreement. Karp stated in the light of those considerations, it was necessary to reach an agreement “that would not require us to compromise our core values and fundamental principles.”

Trump’s actions against the “Big Law” firms are blatantly unconstitutional and undemocratic. They also are strategic and effective and exploit the vulnerability of Big Law. First, Paul Weiss had a lot to lose. Big Law is big business. Two weeks before Trump’s memorandum, Paul Weiss reported its revenue in 2024 were $2.63 billion and its profits per partner were $7.5 million. Second, the Big Law firms seek to provide a full set of legal services to their clients and diminishing its capacity in some practice areas hurts the entire firm, and there is a competitive disadvantage to being “persona non grata with the Administration.” Third, as Karp noted, Big Law firms are highly competitive when it comes to lawyers and clients and will use Trump’s actions to raid a competitor. The lack of a unified response of the law firms is both shameful and furthers the individual firms’ short-term interest. This type of decisionmaking by those who lead institutions — a combination of capitulation to, and avoidance of conflict with, the leader, and exploitation of others — is what enables autocracy to happen.

As somebody who is fueled by vengeance, Trump must take special joy to doing this to Big Law. The Big Law firms would not work for him in his efforts to get the 2020 election overthrown. Now he is weakening them, in the case of Perkins Coie, or getting them to “bend the knee,” in the case of Paul Weiss, who has publicly agreed to do pro bono work supporting Administration initiatives. Karp may claim that the agreement does not compromise the firm’s core values and fundamental principles, but it clearly does, especially in the area of pro bono work. In my twenty years at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the utilization of pro bono was our superpower and it enabled us to dramatically increase our impact.

Regarding Paul Weiss, I remember us co-counseling with the firm to write a Supreme Court amicus brief on extremely short notice in the Texas anti-abortion bounty case. I got a call on a Friday night from plaintiff’s counsel asking if we could file a brief the next Wednesday. I reached out to Paul Weiss that night and we worked together to get that brief filed. Now Paul Weiss has committed itself to pro bono work to further certain Trump Administration initiatives. More important in my view (as well as Trump’s), is that we will not almost certainly be seeing Paul Weiss engaged in any legal challenges against the Administration. Prior to his attack on Big Law, it was difficult to engage many of those firms to challenge the Administration in court. As you might imagine, this has gotten even worse in the last month.

Of course, Trump is not stopping there. This past Saturday, he issued a memorandum to Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem ordering them to investigate lawyers who have challenged the administration. This memorandum includes the following directives:

• directing “the Attorney General to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States;”

• directing “the Attorney General to take all appropriate action to refer for disciplinary action any attorney whose conduct in Federal court or before any component of the Federal Government appears to violate professional conduct rules, including rules governing meritorious claims and contentions, and particularly in cases that implicate national security, homeland security, public safety, or election integrity; “

• directing the “Attorney General, in consultation with any relevant senior executive official, to review conduct by attorneys or their law firms in litigation against the Federal Government over the last 8 years and, where the Attorney General deems appropriate, recommending actions that can be taken against those attorneys and law firms.

Trump is ordering the Department of Justice to use its resources that should be devoted to enforcing federal laws to instead investigate lawyers who have sued the Administration the last several years and to look for opportunities to move for sanctions and institute ethics complaints. To that end, Attorney General Bondi’s brother Bradley is running for President in the upcoming DC Bar election. We can only expect that we are at the beginning of Trump’s efforts to misuse his position to attempt to squash lawsuits against his Administration and him.

Surely there will be more to come in the remaining forty-six months in this Presidential term. It is going to take collective courage and self-sacrifice, as opposed to self-interest, for the legal profession to stand up to this attack on it. Our democracy is headed toward autocracy if we do not.

1. Al Gore in 2000 is the last Democratic nominee for President who was not a lawyer. In the last eleven Presidential elections, he is the only Democratic nominee who was not a lawyer.