In 2018, Brad Karp, chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and Gary Wingens, chairman of Lowenstein Sandler, denounced President Donald Trump’s immigration policies of family separation and detention as “unlawful and immoral” in a New York Times op-ed. That policy of Trump’s first term, Karp and Wingens promised, would be countered by an “army of lawyers,” led by their firms, fighting on behalf of “the poor and the vulnerable against targeted governmental abuses.”
“The world is watching, and the private bar is mobilizing to serve the thousands who have been imperiled by the Trump administration — and to ensure that the rule of law is protected as well,” Karp wrote.
For his and his firm’s efforts fighting for immigrant rights, reproductive rights and gun control, Karp was named attorney of the year by New York Law Journal in 2018. As of March 2024, however, the press release touting this achievement is now nowhere to be found on Paul Weiss’ website. The same goes for a press release promoting a New York Times article from 2018 about Paul Weiss’ work fighting the first Trump administration’s immigration policy.
These are just two examples of dozens of press releases and pages touting the firm’s pro bono work on immigration, reproductive rights, countering right-wing extremists and voting rights that have disappeared from the firm’s web site in the weeks since Trump first issued an executive order seeking to destroy the nearly 150-year old firm.
Paul Weiss learned that the legal community would not circle the wagons to protect their own. Instead of joining together in support, other big law firms circled like vultures, trying to poach the firm’s clients and lawyers. So, Paul Weiss decided to strike a deal.
On March 21, Trump rescinded the executive order after the firm committed to aligning its diversity policies with the administration and providing $40 million in pro bono services to the “mutually agreed upon” priorities with the administration.
The deal sent shockwaves through the legal community, including among ex-Paul Weiss lawyers and staff. It appeared as though the firm, long known for its commitment to diversity and progressive causes, had bent the knee. The decision to capitulate now both undermines the firm’s ability to counter the administration’s excess and potentially takes away a large group of skilled lawyers from the pro bono work that smaller nonprofits rely on to fight back against government abuses of rights.
“It’s really gutting and it goes to the core of what we thought this firm was,” said Elizabeth Grossman, a former Paul Weiss associate who now serves as president of the Illinois chapter of watchdog group Common Cause.
In response to the firm’s deal with Trump, Grossman led a public letter to Karp from more than 140 former Paul Weiss associates and staffers decrying the deal. That letter called the deal “a permanent stain on the face of a great firm that sought to gain a profit by forfeiting its soul.” Paul Weiss did not respond to a request for comment.
“It really sent a shockwave down my spine to know that an entity that had the power to stand up to the executive and for the rule of law simply declined to do so,” said Nora Ahmed, a letter signatory who worked as a litigation attorney at Paul Weiss from 2012-2014 and 2015-2020 and is now legal director for the Louisiana chapter of the ACLU.
“Calling out injustice out loud is different than whispering it behind closed doors.”
- Erin Elmouji, former Paul Weiss lawyer
The firm’s “soul,” according to these former Paul Weiss lawyers, resides in its pro bono work in support of progressive causes, exemplified by its opposition to the first Trump administration’s policies. The deal “will have no effect on our work and our shared culture and values” and the firm will continue its pro bono work, Karp insisted in an internal email to staff. But, former firm lawyers believe that you can’t have it both ways.
“You’d have to be kidding yourself to think the firm can take an openly hostile position to a government overreach in the way that they did during the first administration,” said Erin Elmouji, a former Paul Weiss lawyer from 2012-2018 who signed the letter to Karp. “This has signaled that they will capitulate again. They will appease the government if they need to.”
It’s an existential question not just for the firm itself, but for all the nonprofits that rely on their pro bono services in challenging administration policies.
“Having Paul Weiss bend the knee like this is going to create a ripple effect, and more and more firms, if they follow suit, then these nonprofits that are the last defense against government overreach have fewer and fewer private-sector firms to call on to help marshal this big impact litigation,” Elmouji said.
Paul Weiss isn’t alone among law firms targeted by Trump for punishment. Other Trump executive orders targeted Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie and, on Tuesday, Jenner & Block. But how the firms have responded have varied. So far, only Perkins Coie has challenged these orders in court, winning a temporary restraining order from a federal district court judge who said the order “sent chills down my spine.” Neither Covington & Burling nor Jenner & Block have indicated yet whether they will join Perkins Coie’s lawsuit.
Even beyond a willingness by some firms to capitulate, the lack of unified opposition in the white-shoe legal community is likely to have a significant impact on how the nonprofits that want to bring legal challenges are able to operate.
“A lot of these organizations are going to want to partner with other law firms,” Grossman said. “Even if Paul Weiss was able to work with them, they’re going to say, ‘I can’t work with a firm with these kind of compromised values.’”
As part of its pro bono work, Paul Weiss has worked alongside such big nonprofit advocacy groups as Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Center for Reproductive Rights, Common Cause, Brennan Center for Justice, Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights and Center for Constitutional Rights as well as smaller immigrant rights groups like Make the Road NY, Kids in Need of Defense, Women’s Refugee Commission, The Door and Justice in Motion, among many others.
In a sign of how fraught the current situation is, just two of these dozen groups responded to a request for comment on whether they have concerns about the deal Paul Weiss made with the Trump administration. The Center for Reproductive Rights declined to comment, but did provide the organization’s statement opposing Trump’s attacks on the legal profession. Common Cause was the only one to provide a statement specifically addressing Paul Weiss.
“We hope that Paul Weiss will recommit to supporting organizations like ours but it is hard to trust that they wouldn’t walk away from us if the President didn’t like what they were doing,” Common Cause President Virginia Kase Solomón said in a statement. “There are many talented attorneys at Paul Weiss who want to do this work and the better question we believe is do they want to work for a firm that will acquiesce to an authoritarian.”
So far, Paul Weiss lawyers remain involved in the pro bono work they were previously working on. Ahmed was joined by a Paul Weiss attorney when she attended Supreme Court arguments on Monday in the racial discrimination redistricting case of Louisiana v. Callais.
“The party line is largely that nothing has changed in terms of the ability to work with them going forward,” Ahmed said.
The biggest problem, however, according to former Paul Weiss lawyers, is that even though Karp said in his internal email to staff that the firm had put the threat from the administration behind it, Trump can always change the terms of any deal if he thinks the other party isn’t living up to his expectations.
“They’re somewhat hostage now or there’s an appearance of being a hostage,” said Jonathan Siegfried, who was a lawyer at Paul Weiss from 1975-1981 and signed Grossman’s letter.
Any future break with the administration could lead Trump to reimpose what Karp called “a crisis” and threaten the firm again.
That is evidenced by the deletions across the firm’s website. In addition to the removal of dozens of press releases touting the firm’s work on immigration, voting rights and other issues, the firm’s pro bono landing page no longer lists its areas of work, including those previously titled Protecting Immigrants & Families, Reproductive Justice and Supporting Families, LGBTQ+, Defending the Right to Vote and Combatting Hate. The website for the firm’s Center to Combat Hate, which was only launched in March 2024 and litigated cases against the Proud Boys and white supremacists, no longer exists. Links to it on the firm’s website have disappeared.
The firm may well still take on pro bono cases in support of immigrant rights or other issues, Siegfried said, but, “there’s a difference between doing them proudly because they’re the right thing to do and being very quiet and silent about them.”
“Calling out injustice out loud is different than whispering it behind closed doors,” Elmouji added.
The website deletions spoke directly to the biggest shock and disappointment that the former Paul Weiss lawyers felt when they heard the news about the deal.
“We would have thought that Paul Weiss would have been in the forefront of not pulling those pages down and instead speaking out and rallying firms to provide this representation that’s needed now more than ever,” Siegfried said.
The failure to do so promotes what Elmouji calls “trickle-down cowardice.” Paul Weiss had the reputation and money to stand up to the administration where smaller firms and the nonprofits who hire their lawyers for pro bono work do not. By bowing to Trump and by censoring their website, the firm has set an example and a precedent that trickles down to those less able to fight back.
“We’re already seeing a lot of nonprofits and organizations taking these steps to scrub their websites while still professing to do the work, but we’re just going to hide it or we’re going to take the words down,” Elmouji said. “I think it’s wrong when anybody does it, but I think it’s particularly wrong when lawyers do it.”
Siegfried wondered what Ted Sorensen, the former Paul Weiss lawyer, aide to John F. Kennedy and ghostwriter of Kennedy’s famous Profiles in Courage who died in 2010, would think about the firm’s shocking “surrender,” as Siegfried called it, if he were around.
“Standing up when the stakes are very high — when the stakes are personally high. That’s what a profile in courage is,” Siegfried said. “And that is what, to me, remains the great disappointment.”
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For Ahmed, the pain she feels from Paul Weiss’ capitulation is deeply personal.
“The thing that makes me so sad is Paul Weiss made me the lawyer that I am today,” Ahmed said. “The sadness comes from the fact that I know there are incredible people at that firm who I imagine still today believe so strongly in the civil rights and civil liberties of the people in our nation, including immigrants, and I don’t want that to get lost.”