Brad Karp’s cellphone rang on the evening of Tuesday, March 18th. It was the President of the United States. Karp, the chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the powerful New York law firm, had been trying to reach Donald Trump on the President’s personal cellphone for days, only to get his voice mail. Karp was desperate to find a way out from under an executive order targeting Paul, Weiss, which Trump had signed the previous Friday.
Trump’s order put Paul, Weiss on an Administration blacklist. Firm lawyers were barred from meeting with government employees or entering government buildings; firm clients were at risk of having their government contracts revoked. If the edict stood, Karp believed it would destroy the hundred-and-fifty-year-old firm, an enterprise that Karp had helped build into a behemoth with $2.6 billion in annual revenue, more than a thousand lawyers, and hefty profits per partner of $7.5 million. In an attempt to find an entrée to the White House, he had enlisted Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots and a close friend of Trump’s, to secure a Presidential audience. After Kraft assured the President that Paul, Weiss was willing to pledge millions in pro-bono legal work and to make other concessions, Trump was prepared to grant the meeting. He invited Karp to the White House.
And so ensued a remarkable session in the Oval Office. For more than ninety minutes, beginning around 8:30 A.M. on Wednesday, Karp met with the President of the United States; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; Steven Witkoff, the President’s Middle East envoy; and Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s outside legal counsel. Patched into the meeting by phone from New York was Robert Giuffra, the co-chair of Sullivan & Cromwell, one of Paul, Weiss’s major competitors. Giuffra had been recently hired by Trump to represent him in the appeal of his conviction on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records. Now Giuffra was drafted to help negotiate the terms of an agreement.
Trump was friendly toward Karp, effusive even, saying that he had heard “nice things” about the lawyer. There were fifteen minutes of golf talk, with the President reminiscing about playing with Tiger Woods and Gary Player, and musing about how his Turnberry course, in Scotland, should host the British Open. Trump then launched into a lengthy soliloquy about how the law had been weaponized against him and the role of law firms in that unfair treatment. He complained, in particular, about Mark Pomerantz, a former Paul, Weiss partner who at one point led the Manhattan District Attorney’s criminal investigation of Trump—and who was cited by name in the executive order. “Work this out,” Trump instructed the group as the session concluded. “Let’s get a deal done.”
By the end of the day on Thursday, the parties, negotiating back and forth by e-mail, had reached what was, for Paul, Weiss, the equivalent of a plea bargain;
Trump posted what he said were its terms on his Truth Social website. But this was a deal without an underlying offense: the firm had done nothing wrong, except in Trump’s mind. Even worse, it was a deal to undo a flagrantly unconstitutional order, one that punished the firm for taking legal positions hostile to Trump and for representing clients he did not like. Swallowing it should go down like acid. A spokesperson for Paul, Weiss declined to comment. The White House, when asked for comment, defended the order. The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, wrote, “President Trump is delivering on his promise to end the weaponization of government and protect the nation from partisan and bad faith actors who exploit their influence.”
The stakes here are bigger than the survival of a single firm, even one as iconic as Paul, Weiss. Trump and his allies are engaged in a methodical war against the legal profession, from law schools to the private bar, from the Justice Department to the federal judiciary. Their goal is not only to exact retribution against perceived enemies—although, for Trump, vengeance is never far from top of mind—but to intimidate others who might dare to resist. The Paul, Weiss deal—and the studied silence of other law firms who have refused to speak out against other recent orders—offers an alarming illustration of how impressively the campaign is succeeding. “If law firms can be cowed this easily, then they don’t deserve to be law firms,” John Keker, a veteran San Francisco lawyer whose firm has been one of the few willing to publicly denounce the executive orders, told me. “I can understand why people would be scared of losing clients,” Keker added. “What I don’t understand is why they think putting their heads in the sand is going to be better in the long run.”
From the point of view of Paul, Weiss, having to strike this arrangement wasn’t pleasant, but the price was tolerable. The firm didn’t commit to much that was tangible. It agreed to provide forty million dollars over four years in additional pro-bono work, but that means little to a firm that already allocates some hundred and thirty million dollars a year to free legal services. On the other side of the ledger, fighting the order in court had good prospects of success—but Karp thought that any win would arrive too late. “Clients had told us that they were not going to be able to stay with us, even though they wanted to,” he wrote in a firm-wide e-mail, on Sunday. Meanwhile, he noted, “certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.” The bottom line, according to Karp: “It was very likely that our firm would not be able to survive a protracted dispute with the Administration.”
Some of Karp’s counterparts at other firms are sympathetic to this position. Many more, based on conversations I’ve had with dozens of lawyers in the past several days, are livid at what they see as a craven sellout—one that is particularly galling given the firm’s comfortable position near the top of the heap of Big Law profitability. Clients might leave and lucrative practice groups defect to rival firms, this argument goes, but surely Paul, Weiss could survive a few lean years—its profits per partner, say, plummeting to a mere two million dollars—in the service of standing up to Trump. “There’s no way that Paul, Weiss would have gone under,” one former partner told me.
For many attorneys, the episode encapsulates a lamentable shift in their roles, in which a profession that once embraced the lofty obligation to do good for society has degraded into another grubby enterprise focussed on profits. A letter signed by ninety former Paul, Weiss associates and other employees deplored the “permanent stain on the face of a great firm that sought to gain a profit by forfeiting its soul.” (I was a summer associate there in 1983.)
Whether the Paul, Weiss agreement was a wise compromise or shameful capitulation, the lesson is unavoidable: if a powerhouse like Paul, Weiss cannot, or will not, stand up to Trump, then no firm can. And, if there was any hope that subduing Paul, Weiss might have slaked Trump’s desire to punish firms, it was quickly extinguished with a new order directing the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to pursue sanctions “against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States.” (This is rich coming from the man who has perfected the art of vexatious litigation; in 2023, a federal judge called Trump “the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process.”) Trump followed up, on Tuesday, with an order against another firm that drew his ire, the Chicago-based firm Jenner & Block.
No firm weighing whether to represent a client that has crossed Trump or whether to file a lawsuit against the Administration can afford to ignore these developments. Even before the spate of executive orders, firms were skittish about finding themselves at odds with the new Administration. Now they are terrified, and lining up their own outside counsel. Trump could be coming for them next. On Monday, when the President was asked about his orders against law firms, he made his position clear: firms were to submit to his will. “I just think the law firms have to behave themselves,” he said.
It took the Trump Administration only three weeks to accomplish this subjugation. First, they came for Covington & Burling, the storied Washington firm that had the temerity to represent, pro bono, the former special counsel Jack Smith—“deranged Jack Smith,” in the words of Trump, who has called for Smith to be jailed. An executive order issued on February 25th yanked the security clearance for Smith’s lawyer, the Covington partner Peter Koski, threatening, as Trump well understood, Smith’s constitutional right to counsel; Trump’s own lawyers needed clearances in order to represent him in the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case.
The next firm targeted was Perkins Coie, based in Seattle and with a long history of representing Democratic Party entities and candidates. In 2016, as part of its work for the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, the firm commissioned what came to be known as the Steele dossier, an opposition-research report into the then candidate Trump’s ties to Russia. Trump sued Perkins Coie over the Steele dossier, in 2022, and lost, but he is not one to drop a grudge. The Perkins executive order, issued on March 6th, claimed that “the dishonest and dangerous activity of the law firm . . . has affected this country for decades,” and went on to invoke the dossier.
The Perkins Coie executive order was far more egregious than the one directed against Covington. It not only suspended security clearances for the firm’s lawyers but also barred Perkins Coie employees from entering government buildings or meeting with government officials “when such access would threaten the national security of or otherwise be inconsistent with the interests of the United States.” Even more draconian, it instructed agencies to terminate contracts held by Perkins Coie clients.
“The Order is not just an attempt to constrain or weaken Perkins Coie; its objective is to destroy the Firm,” its lawyers argued in a request for an emergency order suspending most of the edict. “Unless restrained, the Order realistically might succeed in that objective within days.” Perkins Coie’s fifteen highest-billing clients or their affiliates all regularly bid for government contracts. In an affidavit, the partner David Burman said that a major government contractor had already withdrawn its work from Perkins Coie, and that a federal official had informed a client that its Perkins Coie lawyers should not attend a meeting. “The client,” Burman wrote, “after expressing great reluctance and regret, said it was forced to hire other law firms to represent it before the federal government.”
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell quickly blocked the order from taking effect, concluding that it appeared to violate a suite of constitutional protections, including free speech, due process, and the right to counsel. The Administration’s arguments that the President can take action against any entity he deems to be acting against the national interest “sends little chills down my spine,” Howell told Chad Mizelle, the chief of staff to Attorney General Bondi, who had been dispatched to argue the case, a remarkable use of a senior official’s time. Trump, she said, appeared to be “using taxpayer dollars and government resources . . . to pursue what is a wholly personal vendetta.” (The Trump Justice Department has demanded that Howell step aside from the case, saying she “repeatedly demonstrated partiality against and animus towards the president.” Howell refused.)
As the lawsuit proceeds, it is hard to imagine appellate judges—even the Supreme Court’s current conservative super-majority—concluding that the order passes constitutional muster. But it is also difficult to see how Perkins Coie does not emerge grievously damaged. Some clients, new and existing, may be steering business its way in appalled solidarity. Still, clients with issues before the government have to think twice before hiring Perkins Coie. Any corporate general counsel would have a difficult time explaining why retaining Perkins Coie would be in the best interest of shareholders. (A spokesperson for the firm declined to comment.)
The judge’s order and her harsh words, of course, did nothing to deter Trump. Two days after the Perkins Coie order was blocked, he went after Paul, Weiss. This executive order made manifest the implicit message of the first two: that Trump intends to deter large law firms from pursuing the pro-bono cases against Administration policies that plagued him during his first term and that threaten to do so in his second.
“Global law firms have for years played an outsized role in undermining the judicial process and in the destruction of bedrock American principles,” the order stated. “Many have engaged in activities that make our communities less safe, increase burdens on local businesses, limit constitutional freedoms, and degrade the quality of American elections. Additionally, they have sometimes done so on behalf of clients, pro bono, or ostensibly ‘for the public good’—potentially depriving those who cannot otherwise afford the benefit of top legal talent the access to justice deserved by all.”
