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. Two days later, another major firm, WilmerHale, was hit by an executive order. Jenner & Block and WilmerHale filed lawsuits to challenge the edicts against them. Skadden, Arps, a New York powerhouse, took the Paul, Weiss route on Friday; Trump announced that they would devote another hundred million dollars to pro-bono work, in what he described as a “settlement.”
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.”
This argument turns the concept of pro-bono work on its head. A law firm taking on pro-bono representation of a criminal defendant, or a migrant on the verge of being deported, reflects attorneys fulfilling their professional responsibility to represent those unable to pay; in Trump’s reductionist universe, it is making communities less safe. When a firm helps challenge a law that curtails voting rights, it is adhering to the American Bar Association’s advice that firms should represent those “seeking to secure or protect civil rights”; for Trump, it is helping to rig elections.
As always with Trump, there were specific, grudge-based grievances. The Paul, Weiss order noted, although it did not cite her by name, that the partner Jeannie Rhee—perhaps not coincidentally, a top prosecutor in the office of the special counsel Robert Mueller—had provided pro-bono help to the D.C. attorney general in a civil lawsuit against the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and others involved in the January 6th insurrection. (The lawsuit was dropped a few days after Trump issued the Paul, Weiss order.)
The order also singled out Pomerantz, the former Paul, Weiss partner who joined the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, in late 2020, to help oversee the criminal investigation into Trump’s business dealings and personal finances. He quit a little over a year later in frustration, asserting that it was a “grave failure of justice” not to charge Trump, and wrote a book laying out the case against him. (Trump ultimately was indicted and convicted, although on a different theory than the one that Pomerantz had endorsed.) In short, Trump went after Paul, Weiss for a prosecution that a lawyer who was no longer with the firm had never brought.
Paul, Weiss presented a juicy target for Trump. Of the major New York firms, its profile was the most decidedly Democratic. A history on the firm’s website notes that it was “the first major New York City firm to break down the barrier of Jews practicing with Gentiles, the first to hire a Black associate, the first to hire a Black female associate, the first to make a woman a partner.” The Democratic Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson was a firm lawyer, as was John F. Kennedy’s adviser Theodore Sorensen. Current partners include two leading members of the Obama Administration: the former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson.
The firm has a rich tradition of pro-bono work—from helping overturn the convictions of several of the Scottsboro Boys to representing McCarthy-era targets such as J. Robert Oppenheimer to bringing a landmark case that helped establish the right to same-sex marriage. During Trump’s first term, Paul, Weiss proudly joined litigation to combat the Administration’s family-separation policies. Karp co-wrote an opinion piece in the Times decrying the cruel policy and trumpeting the role of lawyers in fighting it. “We’re reuniting families destroyed by the administration,” Karp told the Times for a separate article, which reported that around seventy-five lawyers at the firm were working on that project.
In 2024, Paul Weiss didn’t soft-pedal its liberal leanings. Karen Dunn, the co-chair of the litigation department, oversaw debate preparation for the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Karp became a leader of Harris’s fund-raising efforts, waving off concerns about a backlash if Trump were to win. “Each of us needs to do what we believe is right, whatever the consequences,” Karp said. “That has always been my mantra in leading Paul, Weiss.”
Then came Trump’s Inauguration, and a torrent of executive orders. Public-interest groups challenging these orders found that private firms that were eager to sign on to pro-bono litigation during the first term were reluctant this time around. Paying clients knew how vindictive Trump could be and didn’t want to antagonize him, even if no one imagined that a tactic quite as effective as the executive orders would soon be deployed.
It quickly became clear that the firms would not be willing to protect one another, either, against an Administration determined to terrorize Big Law. Ultimately, Williams & Connolly—a Washington firm whose practice is heavy on litigation rather than corporate transactions—agreed to take Perkins Coie’s case. In a sign of the wary times, Howell, the U.S. district judge, went out of her way at the hearing in which she froze the order to praise Williams & Connolly as “a very brave law firm, to take this on.”
Meanwhile, an effort to recruit firms to join a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Perkins Coie confronted a collective-action problem. Leading law firms, including Paul, Weiss, expressed tentative willingness to sign on to the brief—but only if enough of their peers agreed to put themselves out there, as well, and few were willing to make a definitive commitment. These delicate negotiations were already faltering when Paul, Weiss reached its separate agreement with the Administration.
Karp had concluded even before the Friday night when his firm’s order came down that litigation was not the way to solve the problem. After the Covington order, and again after the one directed at Perkins Coie, he shared that view at the firm’s well-attended, weekly Thursday partners’ lunch. A modern law firm was an inherently fragile enterprise, Karp warned. The point in responding to Trump was not to be a martyr—it was to survive.
Once, firms had been small and clubby, a place where partners practiced together for life. Now they were behemoths, with partners flitting from firm to firm, and taking clients along with them. If anyone understood the economic realities of a twenty-first-century law firm, it was Karp. Since becoming chairman of Paul, Weiss, in 2008, he had presided over its transformation, shifting the firm’s focus from litigation to the constant stream of revenue produced by corporate dealmaking. “In order for us to make sure that we will endure . . . we had to increase our transactional footprint,” Karp told colleagues at his first “state of the union” address as chair. That was not going to happen “organically,” with homegrown talent, Karp said on a legal podcast last year. He needed to go shopping, poaching lawyers from rivals such as Kirkland & Ellis and Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
The hiring spree paid off, with a surge in the firm’s revenue and in profits per partner—even as the new cadre of rainmakers took home salaries in the range of twenty million dollars. But with that came a discernible shift in the firm’s culture, and in the balance of power between the corporate and litigation departments. In 2024, the firm shifted to a “black box” compensation system, in which partners no longer know what their colleagues are making, on the theory that less transparency will reduce tension. Likewise, the firm, following the lead of many others, created a new, lesser tier of partner—so-called non-equity partners. This metamorphosis may have been good for the bottom line, but in the view of many Paul, Weiss veterans it took a toll on culture. This was less a partnership than a business, and the corporate lawyers held the reins.
Karp called an emergency Zoom meeting of the partners for Saturday morning. Clients were already starting to worry—and flee. Steven Schwartz, a New Jersey technology-company executive accused of paying bribes in India, had fired the firm, which had represented him for years, because, as Paul, Weiss lawyers told the judge in the case, Schwartz was “concerned that Paul, Weiss’s ongoing involvement in the matter could in and of itself prejudice the review of his case.” (Schwartz has pleaded not guilty to the bribery charges.)
The partner Kannon Shanmugam, an appellate specialist in the Washington office, started drafting a lawsuit. But litigation was only the fallback, in case the firm failed to find a way to get Trump’s attention. Karp also brought in Quinn Emanuel—a firm that, like Williams & Connolly, is famed for its hard-charging litigation. Quinn Emanuel also had something Williams & Connolly didn’t: ties to Trumpworld. Its co-managing partner, William Burck, who agreed to represent Paul, Weiss, was brought in by Eric Trump at the start of Trump’s second term to be the ethics adviser to the President’s company, and he has represented others close to Trump, including Steve Bannon. Burck and his partner Alex Spiro have represented New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. While Kraft, the Patriots owner, reached out to the President, Burck touched base with people in the offices of the chief of staff and the White House counsel.
After the Oval Office session, the lawyers got to work, trading draft terms by e-mail, text, and telephone. They dickered over the size of the pro-bono commitment, an effort to insert what one source familiar with the negotiations described as “Trumpy language,” and whether the order would be suspended, as the White House team wanted, or rescinded, as Paul, Weiss preferred. (It was rescinded.) The eventual agreement consisted, in part, of innocuous boilerplate. “Paul, Weiss agrees that the bedrock principle of American Justice is that it must be fair and nonpartisan for all,” one such section read.
Other aspects were more disconcerting, implying that the Administration would have a role in overseeing firm affairs. “Paul, Weiss affirms its commitment to merit-based hiring, promotion, and retention, and will not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies,” the White House version of the agreement read. “As part of its commitment, it will engage experts, to be mutually agreed upon within 14 days, to conduct a comprehensive audit of all of its employment practices.” (The Paul, Weiss summary of the agreement omitted any outright renunciation of D.E.I.) The firm’s promise to finance pro-bono activities specified that it would “support the Administration’s initiatives, including: assisting our Nation’s veterans, fairness in the Justice System, the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and other mutually agreed projects.” To read this was to wonder: When did the President become the boss of Paul, Weiss?
But the most appalling aspect of the episode involved the treatment of Pomerantz, the well-liked former partner who’d had the brass to investigate Trump. In his Truth Social post—and, more significant, in his official order revoking the decree—the President asserted that Karp “acknowledged the wrongdoing” of Pomerantz. Whether Karp made such an acknowledgment is the subject of intense dispute. The Paul, Weiss summary of the agreement did not contain any such admission of “wrongdoing,” and Karp insisted to a person who was not present at the meeting that he did nothing to denigrate Pomerantz or to indicate acceptance of Trump’s criticism. Still, a person familiar with the meeting said that Karp pointed out to the President that Pomerantz had not been formally associated with the firm for years. (He didn’t note that Paul, Weiss was representing Pomerantz in matters relating to his work for the Manhattan District Attorney and his book on Trump.) A second person familiar with the meeting insisted, “Everything in the President’s statement is completely and totally factual.” Certainly, Karp, in the context of pleading for his law firm’s life, was not about to defend Pomerantz and antagonize the President.
When the Truth Social post came out, Paul, Weiss registered its objections to the White House, only to be told there was nothing to be done. The firm made no public comment—and Pomerantz’s peers were furious. “Are we in effect now muzzled, and we’re not going to be saying anything for fear that we’ll be targeted once again?” one former partner asked. “I’m assuming they just want to keep their heads down. I think it’s quite troubling. I wonder if the Paul, Weiss of ten years ago would have done this, and I want to believe the answer is no.”
Pomerantz, for his part, took the high road. “I do not believe that Brad Karp or Paul, Weiss ‘acknowledged’ any ‘wrongdoing’ on my part,” he said in a statement provided to The New Yorker. “They know, and I know, that my efforts to prosecute Donald Trump were entirely lawful. What matters is not what the President is saying about me, but what he is doing to crush opposition from anyone who disagrees with him about anything.”
Another potential problem for the firm surfaced on Tuesday, when Isaac Stanley-Becker, of The Atlantic, reported that Paul, Weiss “severed ties with the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil-rights organization, the League of United Latin American Citizens.” LULAC’s C.E.O., Juan Proaño, told me that he received a call this past Thursday morning from a Paul, Weiss lawyer, informing him that the firm, which had previously done pro-bono work for LULAC, could no longer represent the organization, which has challenged Trump’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship. “Clearly, looking at it, they were basically under some pressure to disengage from certain types of representation,” Proaño said, of Paul, Weiss. After the Atlantic article appeared, Paul, Weiss backpedalled. “We are proud to represent them in this matter, look forward to future representations, and have enormous respect for their work,” Karp said in a statement on LULAC. But the encounter suggested a disturbing willingness to back away from clients who might be disfavored by the White House.
In the short term, Karp may have done the right thing for his firm, if at enormous personal cost. Yet, whatever the deal means for Paul, Weiss, its acquiescence to Trump marks a sad day for the legal profession—or what once was a profession, and is now just another business. It marks an even sadder day for the rule of law, which can only be vindicated when there are lawyers fearless enough to stand up for it, no matter the price. ♦
This article has been updated to include news developments.
