As Trump Targets Law Firms, the Legal Industry Remains Sharply Divided on How to Respond

In the weeks since President Donald Trump began hammering some powerful law firms with significant punishments and cutting deals with others, the legal industry has been bitterly divided on how to respond and deeply worried about the showdown’s repercussions.

Trump’s sanctions and some firms’ decisions to strike deals with him have shaken the profession, with attorneys across the country grappling with fear, outrage, anxiety and uncertainty. Attorneys at some law firms that reached agreements with Trump have quit in protest, while others have debated whether to make the same move.

“People are despondent,” said an attorney who used to work at a firm that struck a deal with Trump. “It is devastating to all of us. Nobody really knows what to do.”

Since February, Trump has been targeting several high-profile firms that challenged his policies or had ties to his perceived enemies, signing executive orders stripping them of government contracts and banning their attorneys from federal buildings. Some firms filed lawsuits fighting his orders, while others sought to avoid sanctions and agreed to deals promising a total of nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal counsel to causes Trump supports.

In messages to their employees, some firms that reached agreements with Trump defended the decisions as necessary to keep their businesses afloat. But attorneys across the industry said the issue is larger than any one firm’s revenue, describing Trump’s penalties and deals alike as imperiling core elements of the legal system – including a person’s right to choose their own lawyers and those lawyers’ ability to represent them zealously, even against the government.

Many of the attorneys spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal or because they were not authorized to speak by their current firms.

Attorneys said Trump’s executive orders are dangerous because they punish firms and lawyers for employing people or pursuing cases he dislikes. His deals with law firms are also treacherous, they said, and they suggested those firms and others might be scared to pursue challenges he opposes. These issues cut to the core of the justice system, the attorneys said.

“These executive orders can’t be viewed as just interfering with the relationships between big law firms with well-paid partners and their clients,” said Patrick McGlone, a former president of the D.C. Bar. “They’re laying the foundation to interfere with the administration of justice, where clients can select the lawyer without worrying about what prior cases was that lawyer involved in, what prior clients did that lawyer represent or is currently representing, and [if] they’ll get a fair hearing before the government.”

In his orders, Trump accused law firms including Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale of wrongdoing. He singled out firms’ connections to his perceived enemies – noting WilmerHale hired Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Trump during his first term, and that Jenner & Block brought on Andrew Weissmann, one of Mueller’s deputies. (Both men left the firms in 2021.) Trump’s orders in some cases also criticized firms for conducting what he called “harmful activity through their powerful pro bono practices.”

All three of those firms filed lawsuits challenging Trump’s orders as unconstitutional. Federal judges at least temporarily blocked most of Trump’s punishments, and the firms are seeking to have his orders permanently blocked. WilmerHale and Jenner & Block declined to comment for this story. Perkins Coie did not respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department has sought to dismiss their lawsuits, saying Trump’s actions are lawful and accusing law firms of trying to muzzle his speech.

Trump has also continued his campaign, signing an order last week targeting the firm Susman Godfrey. The firm quickly challenged his order, saying in a lawsuit his punishments were “a clear and harmful attempt to discourage law firms and their clients from challenging abuses of government power.” A judge on Tuesday afternoon at least temporarily halted most of the order punishing Susman Godfrey.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this story last week, but after Tuesday’s ruling, White House spokesman Harrison Fields defended Trump’s actions and said his “recent measures address rogue law firms and fulfill his commitment to holding bad actors accountable.”

At the same time, Trump struck deals with nine other firms, beginning with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the firm known as Paul Weiss. Trump targeted that firm with an executive order, then said in a social media post he was withdrawing the punishments after the firm agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services “to support the Administration’s initiatives,” including assisting veterans, combating antisemitism and “fairness in the Justice System.”

More deals soon followed, all announced by Trump on social media – and for more money. Trump said he made deals with the firms Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; and Milbank, saying each one promised $100 million in pro bono legal work.

On Friday, Trump announced that he had reached agreements with five firms promising a combined $600 million. Four of them, Trump said, would provide $125 million each. These agreements included several of the country’s richest law firms, including Kirkland & Ellis, which leads all U.S. firms in revenue.

Firms that have struck deals either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

Some of the firms that made deals had received letters from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requesting information about their diversity practices, a target of the Trump administration. Four firms that made deals announced Friday had received letters, and those were withdrawn, Trump said.

Trump has boasted about the agreements, saying firms had “paid me a lot of money in the form of legal fees” and were “signing up with Trump.”

“They give you $100 million, and then they announce, ‘But we have done nothing wrong,’” Trump said during a recent White House event. “And I agree they’ve done nothing wrong. But what the hell – they give me a lot of money, considering.”

These agreements have infuriated lawyers inside and outside those firms.

“That’s literally a cash transfer,” said one attorney who used to work at a firm Trump has targeted. “It’s measured in terms of service, right, but it’s a $100 million transfer of value from a firm to the administration. That’s a straight-up heist scheme.

“They’ve pointed a gun at the firm’s head and said, ‘Give me $40 million or give me $100 million, or else,’” the attorney said.

Some attorneys have quit in response to the deals, including Brenna Trout Frey, an attorney who resigned from Skadden when it struck a deal with Trump.

“Watching firm after firm bend the knee to the president, how many other firms that aren’t in the president’s crosshairs at the moment will quietly tell attorneys that they’re unable to take on pro bono work that the president would find objectionable?” she wrote for Bloomberg recently.

Other attorneys are unsure what they should do, particularly younger lawyers who have weighed resigning but worry about the financial hit they could take.

“Nobody really knows what to do,” said an attorney who previously worked at a firm that struck a deal. “Everyone’s kind of panicked, everyone feels guilty for staying.”

The attorney said they were terrified by Trump’s campaign and the firms’ deals. “To have the president’s finger on the scale in the way that it is right now, to feel that he is dictating the representation we can take and how we conduct our business, it completely changes my sense of what we are doing,” the attorney said.

Attorneys say the deals with Trump will have other negative consequences. There are only so many hours available for pro bono work, attorneys say, which they described as necessary to help vulnerable populations.

Big firms have boasted about their pro bono work. In a court filing, Jenner & Block said last year its lawyers spent nearly 91,000 combined hours on pro bono work, including aiding people denied Social Security benefits, helping victims of sex trafficking and domestic violence, and advocacy for veterans.

Focusing on Trump’s priorities means “somebody’s going to have to do that work” and put in hours on those cases rather than others, said an attorney at a Midwestern law firm. “It curtails your ability to do what I view as better and more valuable pro bono work.”

Firms that struck deals with Trump have defended these agreements, saying the administration will not be controlling their work.

Scott Edelman, chairman of Milbank, wrote to employees that nothing in his firm’s agreement gives the Trump administration power “to dictate or approve the matters we take on. Nor have we restricted our pro bono activities or limited positions we could take on behalf of our clients.”

Kirkland’s executive committee wrote to employees on Friday that the firm would continue deciding what issues and cases it takes up “both pro bono and otherwise – consistent with our non-partisan mindset.”

Some attorneys at other firms were skeptical, questioning whether a place that struck a deal with Trump would ever take on cases or clients his administration dislikes.

Precisely why some firms made deals and others fought Trump’s orders vary depending on the specific firm, though attorneys and experts said the divide has its roots in core differences between those firms as well as broader changes across the legal profession.

Some firms focus heavily on litigation, while others are more centered on transactional or corporate matters, including mergers and acquisitions or regulatory issues, said David Wilkins, a Harvard Law professor who has studied large law firms and the legal sector for 40 years.

Firms can do both of those things, he said, but some big firms will focus more on one of them. Working more on litigation means dealing more with disputes, such as representing a client bringing a lawsuit or facing a trial, while transactional firms will represent big banks, investment funds or work on corporate mergers.

The firms fighting in court tend to be litigation-focused, while the places making deals are more transaction-centric, Wilkins and others said.

Wilkins said the transaction-heavy firms require access to government documents and officials to do their work, including on big corporate deals. And since these deals can be time sensitive, he said, clients may potentially leave rather than wait out a lawsuit or a lengthy fight with the government.

“The more transactionally focused and the more transaction-heavy the firm is, the more it has at risk, and the easier it is for it to unravel if it is barred from doing the kinds of things that are required in a … high-end transactional, regulatory practice,” Wilkins said.

Some firms reaching deals have acknowledged the risks. Edelman, the Milbank chairman, told employees in his letter that “as a large law firm that does a majority of its work on transactional matters, we are dependent on our ability to navigate client issues in all parts of the Executive Branch.”

Another issue at play is the possibility that lawyers could jump ship.

Wilkins said that while attorneys used to mostly stick with one firm, in recent decades it became more common for lawyers to switch employers. And since some lawyers bring in a lot of revenue from clients that may be more loyal to those attorneys than any particular firm, lawyers who leave and take a high-value client with them could make an outsize dent in a firm’s revenue, he said.

When a law firm appears to be in trouble, Wilkins said, “people come to try to recruit their top partners, and that recruitment of top partners can help to unravel the firm.”

Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss, alluded to this in a letter he wrote to employees about his deal with Trump. Karp wrote that “certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.” He said the firm probably would not survive a lengthy fight with the Trump administration, so it cut a deal.

Wilkins and other attorneys said Trump’s penalties were also perilous for the firms fighting them in court. These firms have portrayed Trump’s orders as catastrophic, with WilmerHale writing in a court filing that the “draconian restrictions threaten the very viability of the firm’s business model.”

If Trump’s punishments are left to stand, they would prevent lawyers from doing their jobs, said an attorney at WilmerHale.

“The day-to-day job of many lawyers is to meet with the government and to argue in court,” the attorney said.

Some lawyers say they feel sympathy for the firms and leaders navigating difficult choices about whether to fight, but they felt frustrated to see some firms cut deals or stay silent on the issue.

“Every lawyer I speak to in private recognizes the plain unlawfulness of what’s happening,” the WilmerHale attorney said. “The fact that more people won’t stand up for it, be it by litigating the orders or speaking up publicly about it, is frustrating.”