Trump Attack on Big Law Moves Beyond Revenge, Latest Deals Show

President Donald Trump’s offensive against Big Law has moved beyond retribution, as firms with no past adversarial relationship with him feel pressure to appease.

Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, A&O Shearman and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft struck deals with the administration Friday, promising $600 million worth of legal services.

The firms are among the most prestigious and profitable in the country, with many of them focusing on private equity deals. Kirkland and Latham consistently rank highest in revenue, hauling in $8.8 billion and $7 billion, respectively, last year.

“Trump is forcing elite large, profitable, and influential firms to settle—even when there’s no adversarial history with him—to show that no firm is safe,” said Kevin Burke, a former leader of law firm Hinshaw & Culbertson who now teaches at University of Southern California’s law school. “The intent is to establish a new compliance standard and stigmatize resistance by law firms.”

Law firms’ overall deals with Trump, which now reach $940 million in pledged legal services, came after he issued executive orders that branded law firms as opponents involved in “weaponization” against him. Those orders targeted firms such as WilmerHale, where Trump investigator Robert Mueller was once a partner, and Jenner & Block, which once employed Andrew Weissmann, who was part of Mueller’s team.

None of Friday’s settling firms have been the subject of an order, nor has Trump publicly expressed any animus toward them.

“Once Trump discovered that many big law firms were cowards and that he could extort free legal services from them by illegally threatening them, I think he decided, why limit himself to firms that had actually done things to piss him off,” said Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School. Lemley organized an amicus brief by law professors for a Perkins Coie lawsuit challenging a Trump order.

In total, four law firms targeted with orders are fighting back, while nine have reached deals with the president. One firm, Covington & Burling, has not fought the directive or reached a deal.

Kirkland said of the deal: “We made the decision to pursue this solution because at our very core our mission is to protect and support our people and our clients, and this agreement does both.”

Tipping Point

Kirkland, the biggest firm to settle Friday, is known in the industry for being ruthlessly business-minded and is hardly a champion of progressive causes.

It was the professional home of several attorneys who worked in Trump’s first administration, including former Attorney General Bill Barr and Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark, who was disbarred over election claims.

Kirkland proactively approached the Trump administration to discuss a deal, according to a person familiar with the situation.

It’s unclear whether the other four law firms that made deals Friday also preemptively reached out to the White House. But the stakes are high for these firms, which all have major transactional practices that rely on persuading federal regulators to look favorably upon their clients.

Paul Weiss, after being hit with an order, was the first firm to strike a deal with Trump after its lawyers security clearances and its clients’ federal contracts were threatened. The subsequent rush to avoid punitive presidential orders through settlements has generated alarm throughout the legal industry.

“This is a systemic effort to erode the independence of the legal profession,” Burke said. “If we fail to respond—collectively, courageously, and clearly—we risk normalizing a future where silence is safety and independence and commitment to the rule of law is punished.”

Big Law Disruptor

Kirkland has traditionally been viewed as an outsider to the clubby group of New York law firms such as Paul Weiss and another firm that also struck a deal with Trump—Skadden. But Kirkland has nevertheless surpassed those firms in revenue, profitability, and influence.

Many of the New York firms adopted a business model championed by Kirkland that promotes a vast number of associates into a “non-equity partner” position, which does not earn profits the way equity partners do. New York firms have agonized over the switch, which some viewed as diluting the tight-knit partnerships that long defined their cultures. But it has become the norm as these firms increasingly focus on corporate transactions.

With its vast size and immense profitability, Kirkland has helped to usher in an era of increasing competition for Big Law’s rainmakers. The highest-earning Kirkland partners were taking home $20 million as early as 2022—a threshold that many elite New York firms have adjusted to match.

Maya Sen, a co-author of a 2016 paper that found Kirkland’s lawyers have a conservative tilt relative to their peers, said that while most lawyers skew liberal, Trump hasn’t found ways to target other liberal industries, such as Hollywood. That suggests part of his objective is to weaken the broader role lawyers play in American society, said Sen, who is at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“The legal profession really holds itself out to be an important pillar of democratic governance,” Sen said. “And so by attacking law firms and the legal industry, which is what this is really about, you kind of undermine that pillar.”

War Chest

Trump has mused he’ll use the $940 million he’s collected thus far to have lawyers do things like represent the coal industry in leasing agreements and negotiate trade deals following his implementation of tariffs.

Lemley said Trump’s comments on the deals so far make clear that he intends to direct how the pro bono money is spent regardless of what the law firms think.

“This way he can have his own giant legal slush fund, and also scare many big firms away from ever being adverse to him,” Lemley said.

Trump is “transactional about things that might surprise others because they have not been made transactional before, such as permission to go on operating as a large law firm,” said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies.