Dear listeners,
Paul Weiss is the third law firm to come under attack from the Trump administration and the first one to cut a deal, agreeing to certain terms about its practices in exchange for Trump withdrawing an executive order that effectively aimed to bankrupt the firm. According to Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp, this was just good business. In a letter to the firm’s employees, he argued they did not have to agree to much — reaffirming its commitments to ideological diversity and following employment law, and adding $10 million of annual pro bono work in areas it already supports — and that Paul Weiss often advises its clients to settle when favorable terms are available, even if they haven’t done anything wrong. But Trump gave his own unauthorized account of Paul Weiss’s agreements — saying the firm would abandon “DEI” entirely, for example, and suggesting a significant degree of government control over the choice of those pro bono projects — and who knows how the firm will make business decisions under the specter that the administration could come back with more demands in the future.
As Ken notes, a capitulation like this probably does help firms retain certain transactional business, but it may also dissuade some litigation clients, who will wonder if Paul Weiss will stand up for them if they get crosswise with the government. Of course, it’s not just Paul Weiss that may come away from this episode more reluctant to stand up to the administration. This is the point of the assault on lawyers and law firms: the administration wants to discourage them from suing the government or taking on clients it disfavors.
We talk about how different business incentives are likely to prompt different responses from different firms to Trump’s attacks, and about the difficulty of solving one problem Paul Weiss has protested that it faces: You can win against the government in court, but no court can make clients want to hire you or force them to disregard the administration’s posture toward you. We talk about the allegations that rival firms, far from exercising solidarity in defense of the legal profession, seized on this episode to try to hire lawyers away from Paul Weiss. And we look at new orders designed to ratchet up pressure on other firms.
In other news, Columbia University has similarly given in to demands from the administration — more substantive demands than the ones Paul Weiss did — but that hasn’t gotten Columbia anywhere close to Trump’s good graces. An appeals court panel has backed up Judge James Boasberg, declining to disturb his temporary restraining order that bars the administration from more renditions under the Alien Enemies Act, for now. And the Houthi war planning Signal chat is now the subject of a lawsuit — also before Judge Boasberg, lol — alleging that the administration is disobeying the Federal Records Act by setting those messages to auto-delete.
We hope you enjoy the episode,
Josh
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