President Donald Trump’s game of hardball against Big Law has the legal industry in an uproar, with some firms vowing to fight back.
A lawyer at a top 20 firm told Business Insider they helped draft papers to file in court in case their firm is targeted by the administration.
“We very quickly put together a set of briefing and papers that could be filed,” the lawyer said. “We’re ready to go to court and challenge the order.”
Trump’s pressure campaign — which lawyers and scholars say is an unprecedented threat to the legal community and a blow to the First Amendment — shows no sign of letting up.
“The legal industry is under attack. Trump pushes the limits of everything: the legal boundaries, picking fights with massive law firms. He’s calling for the impeachment of federal judges,” Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, told Business Insider.
“So look, say what you want about him, but he seems to be winning — or at least putting a lot of pressure on folks throughout the legal industry to capitulate and bend to his will.”
Trump’s attacks on Big Law
In recent weeks, Trump has targeted major law firms — like Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie, and Covington & Burling — ordering reviews of their government contracts, stripping the firm’s lawyers of their security clearances, and preventing employees of the firms from entering federal buildings.
Trump has described the firms as “dishonest and dangerous,” accusing each of weaponizing the judicial process and threatening national security by representing his opponents or participating in investigations into his finances and behavior.
Large law firms’ clients tend to hire them not just for their knowledge, but for their connections with the government, so Trump’s threats to destroy those connections are a powerful cudgel.
Trump announced Thursday that he had rescinded his executive order targeting Paul Weiss after the firm agreed to reevaluate its hiring practices in alignment with Trump’s anti-DEI initiatives and provide the administration with $40 million in pro bono legal work.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” a former Paul Weiss employee told Business Insider. “The firm that prepped Kamala, sent its leaders to Ukraine, defended state abortion rights, and championed DE&I in law has made a deal with the devil. I’m sure many at the firm are feeling betrayed.”
Rachel Cohen, an associate from the high-profile firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, publicly resigned over what she said was her firm’s resistance to challenging the president’s orders.
“Paul Weiss’ decision to cave to the Trump administration on DEI, representation, and staffing has forced my hand,” Cohen wrote in a resignation email, which she said she sent to her entire firm. “We do not have time. It is now, or it is never, and if it is never, I will not continue to work here.”
In an email to his staff on Sunday, Paul Weiss Chairman Brad Karp called Trump’s order “unprecedented” in the firm’s 150-year history and an “existential threat.”
“The executive order could easily have destroyed our firm. It brought the full weight of the government down on our firm, our people, and our clients,” Karp wrote.
Perkins Coie, which was also targeted by an executive order from Trump that would revoke its lawyers’ security clearances and cancel government contracts, has chosen to fight back. The major Seattle-based law firm filed a legal challenge earlier this month.
Other law firms have begun to rally around Perkins Coie. The law firm Munger Tolles Olsen, which has about 200 attorneys in three offices, said Saturday it would file an amicus brief supporting Perkins Coie. Keker, Van Nest, & Peters, a highly respected San Francisco-based firm with more than 100 attorneys, said in a social media post it would also sign the amicus brief.
“We encourage law firm leaders to sign on to an amicus effort in support of Perkins Coie’s challenge to the Administration’s executive order targeting the firm, and to resist the Administration’s erosion of the rule of law,” Keker, Van Nest, & Peters wrote in its post.
Selendy Gay, a New York-based firm with 80 attorneys, updated its homepage with a statement in support of Perkins Coie, saying it “rejects the notion that the government can punish lawyers for their choice of clients or threaten judges for presiding over cases adverse to the administration.”
“We stand with the brave lawyers who will oppose any attempts by the government to intimidate members of the bar or judiciary for doing their jobs.”
On Friday, Trump moved to disqualify the judge presiding over the Perkins Coie suit, citing bias.
The president also on Friday sent a memo to Attorney General Pam Bondi ordering her to identify “frivolous” lawsuits against his administration and flag the law firms associated with the cases so they can be targeted for punitive actions like those levied against Paul Weiss and Perkins Coie.
“That was another shot across the bow. People really have to now think, are they going to tolerate this kind of behavior?” asked Alex Kristofcak, a former assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York, who was put on leave after criticizing Trump’s DEI policies. He has since resigned.
“The federal government is extremely powerful. I am frankly pretty scared about what else they could do. I’m very happy that I’m a citizen, so I guess, at least in theory, they can’t deport me. It sounds like such a hysterical thing to say, but I don’t think that it is, given what’s happening.”
A ‘constitutional crisis’
Walter Olson, a Cato Institute fellow who writes about the legal profession, told Business Insider he’s “not aware of any precedent” similar to Trump’s attacks on law firms.
“There’s nothing on this scale,” Olson said. “There’s nothing involving this kind of retaliation using presidential powers that rarely get used in any context.”
Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told BI that the government, in the late 1940s, targeted writers, lawyers, and professors for perceived disloyalty during the period known as the Second Red Scare, led by then-Senator Joseph McCarthy — but that the episode has long been considered “a shameful part of our history in terms of free speech.”
“This level of it is unprecedented,” Fallow said. “Of course, firms have always played the game, and they’ve always been cognizant of which party is in power and have tried to — for example, when Republicans are in power — hire Republican attorneys. So it’s not that that hasn’t been happening, but this kind of stark bullying and capitulation is just really shocking.”
Very few people are inclined to pity a multimillion-dollar law firm, but Trump’s attacks on the legal field have implications beyond those firms themselves.
Rahmani said the Trump administration’s attacks on Big Law violate both the First Amendment, since lawyers should represent who they want without penalty, and the Fifth Amendment, because the moves can make it harder for average citizens to secure legal counsel from firms that the Trump administration hasn’t approved.
“Something like this has never happened, or maybe hasn’t happened since the time of Andrew Jackson. I mean, this is really a kind of a constitutional crisis,” Rahmani said. “I think our legal system is under attack, and it’s a question of who’s going to step up and defend it.”
