Paul Weiss Deal With Trump Haunts Industry One Year Later (1)

Welcome back to the Big Law Business column. I’m Roy Strom, and today we look at the fallout from Paul Weiss’ deal with the Trump administration one year after it was reached. Sign up for Business & Practice, a free morning newsletter from Bloomberg Law. Programming Note: Big Law Business will be off next week.

A year after Paul Weiss Chairman Brad Karp shuttled to the White House to strike a deal with President Donald Trump, the fallout is still shaking the law firm, the legal profession, and the president’s agenda in court.

The Paul Weiss deal announced March 20, 2025 offered $40 million in legal services to the administration and served as a blueprint for eight other firms who would later pledge $900 million.

The agreement weakened Paul Weiss’ reputation in the market in the year since. The legal profession is struggling to backfill pro bono work that the largest law firms used to take on. And the Trump administration losses against four law firms that challenged the orders have proven to be a bellwether of how judges can curtail the president’s retribution streak.

Trump has insisted that his Justice Department continue to fight the four rulings against his law firm orders. Still, he has moved on in the sense that he has not targeted a law firm since the judges acted.

“Even without further executive orders, if what already occurred is enough to cause the biggest firms to be afraid to do what they used to do, that is not a good thing for our country,” said Shira Scheindlin, a former Manhattan federal judge who’s now at Boies Schiller. Scheindlin is part of a group advocating that lawyers sign an ethics pledge preventing them from entering into deals with the administration.

Paul Weiss’ reputation arguably has been the hardest hit of any of the nine law firms that struck accords with the administration, partly because of the notoriety of being the first to settle.

The agreement also sat discordantly with the profession’s elevated view of the firm and Karp—providing a greater height from which to fall.

Karp had previously positioned his firm and himself as a bulwark against Trump. He rallied more than 30 Big Law leaders in 2018 to the cause of reuniting immigrant children who had been separated from their families under Trump’s border policy.

“Paul Weiss had a reputation as a firm that stood up for civil liberties and took on tough cases and had principles, and that reputation is really tarnished,” said Elliot Peters, a partner at San Francisco-based Keker Van Nest & Peters. “A lot of good lawyers left some of those firms, they certainly left Paul Weiss. And I hope they feel shame for not standing up for the most basic tenets of our profession.”

Karp stepped down from his chair role in February after details emerged about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The firm did not respond to a request for comment.

Lawyer Moves

Damian Williams, the former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, left Paul Weiss a little more than two months after the firm struck its deal. Williams joined Jenner & Block, one of the four firms that took Trump to court over executive orders.

Jenner secured a ruling blocking the Trump action. Williams noted at the time that his new firm “doesn’t shy away from hard fights—and delivers results that matter.”

A group of litigators departed to join their own firm in a move widely seen as responsive to the Trump deal—even though those lawyers didn’t publicly say so. Less heralded is a surge in associate departures from Paul Weiss, which rose to 224 in the 12 months through this week. That’s up from 128 in the previous 12-month period, according to data from SurePoint Legal Insights.

In total, more than 260 lawyers left Paul Weiss over the last year . That’s a 70% rise from the previous 12-month period. The firm’s total lawyer hires shrunk by roughly a quarter, the data show.

Pro Bono Backfilling

Many Big Law firms have shied away from pro bono causes, particularly involving immigration issues.

A staff lawyer at the National Immigrant Justice Center told a court shortly after the Trump issued the executive orders that large law firms the agency typically partnered with had suspended accepting new matters “due to messaging from the White House.”

Others have tried to pick up the slack. Lawyers for Good Government launched the Pro Bono Litigation Corps as a direct response to the president’s pressure campaign on large firms. Gary DiBianco, who retired from Skadden in 2023, co-founded and leads the group.

Some large firms are working with the group, but mostly behind the scenes, said Amy Powell, who joined Lawyers for Good Government in August after leaving a 20-year career at the Justice Department.

That support, she said, is even more limited in immigration cases, the context where there is arguably the greatest need. Powell recently visited an immigrant detention center in El Paso, Texas, meeting with people who she said often didn’t know why they were there or what was happening in court related to their immigration status.

The group has been working to train lawyers to file habeas petitions challenging an unlawful detention but needs attorneys willing to travel to court in West Texas.

Law firms’ collective response “is very different” from how they acted in the wake of Trump’s travel ban in his first term, Powell said.

Not all firms have avoided the work. Gibson Dunn has represented a group of immigration legal service providers challenging the government’s termination of funding for legal services for unaccompanied minors. Quinn Emanuel represented Kilmar Abrego, the Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador.

Retribution Limits

Trump’s executive orders against law firms served as an early, obvious example of the president’s retribution streak.

While the campaign against Big Law succeeded in chilling many large firms from challenging the administration, it also exposed a weakness that courts have since seized upon.

The executive orders targeting specific law firms were strikingly upfront about why the firms were chosen, expressing personal animus against lawyers who had crossed the president. As a result, judges made straightforward calls that the orders violated First Amendment protections.

Other efforts by the president haven’t been as explicitly telegraphed, such as subpoenas issued to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell by the Justice Department, which said it was investigating him for possibly lying under oath to Congress regarding renovation of the Fed’s Washington office.

Still, a judge this month quashed the subpoenas, holding they were a pretext to punish Powell for not fulfilling the president’s desire to lower interest rates. The judge cited Trump’s own language and his previous dismissal of a US Attorney for not carrying out his orders, saying judges are not limited by “naivete from which ordinary citizens are free.”

“The executive orders against law firms stated in their text that there was a retaliatory purpose,” said Dave McGowan, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. “They aren’t independently causing judges to rule in different ways in different cases. But because the retaliatory purpose was so transparently declared in each of the orders, they do stand as a strong example that this is the kind of thing the administration is willing to do.”

The Road Ahead

The fallout from the Paul Weiss deal and those agreements that followed is not over.

One risk is whether the firms will take a hit in law school recruiting. The Association of American Law Schools this month is starting a six-week “teach-in” to discuss the ethics of the law firm deals. The effort will reach students at schools including Georgetown, Harvard, and Indiana—pipelines for Big Law recruiting.

The firms are likely to fill their classes, McGowan said. Students have debt, and the firms pay good wages. “The fact they can still hire people doesn’t mean it wasn’t a mistake,” he said.

Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers have been sending letters to firms seeking more information on the deals. While firms have largely ignored those inquiries, the lawmakers could bring subpoena power if Democrats gain the US House majority in November.

Should Paul Weiss require another emissary to Washington, that job may fall to Karp’s succesor as chairman, Scott Barshay.

Worth Your Time

On Litigation Funding: Big Law is backing away from investor-funded lawsuits, Emily Siegel reports. The 200 largest US law firms accounted for just under a quarter of investors’ new case commitments as of June 30 2025, down from 37% in the same period in the previous year, according to a Westfleet Advisors report.

On Vereins: DLA Piper’s decision to ditch its Swiss verein structure solves a nagging issue about how partners at the global law firm are compensated for sending work to colleagues elsewhere, Meghan Tribe and I report.

On Law Firm Leaders: Weil Gotshal & Manges’ Barry Wolf will hand over the reins to private equity partner Ramona Nee next year, Justin Henry reports. Nee, who has served as a co-managing partner for more than a year, will take over for Wolf as executive partner in January. Meanwhile, I spoke with Mayer Brown leader Jon Van Gorp for Bloomberg Law’s On The Merits podcast.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading and please send me your thoughts, critiques, and tips.