Big Law Leans Left—and Is Moving Further Left, Research Shows

In 2024, the US electorate moved to the right. In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.4 percentage points, but in 2024, Donald Trump carried the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points—a 6-point swing.

Did Big Law attorneys also become more conservative between 2020 and 2024? Apparently not. New research suggests that Big Law, already quite liberal, moved even further to the left during this four-year period.

University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller has been tracking the political contributions of lawyers and staff at large law firms for more than a decade. He first wrote about the topic in 2013, based on data from the 2012 presidential election, then revisited it in 2021, looking at the period from 2017 to 2020.

This year, Muller updated his research yet again. He began with 150 law firms: the Am Law 100—the nation’s 100 largest law firms based on revenue, which do primarily defense-side work—and 50 comparable plaintiffs’ firms, taken from the NLJ 500 or Legal 500 rankings. He reviewed contributions by lawyers and staff at these firms to the Biden/Harris presidential campaigns, the Trump campaign, major Democratic and Republican party organizations, and two leading aggregators of campaign contributions, ActBlue (Democratic) and WinRed (Republican). He looked at a two-year period, covering 2023 and 2024.

Muller’s research captured around $52 million in contributions to Democratic-affiliated groups, compared with approximately $4 million to Republican-affiliated groups. So 92.45% of the funds went to Democrats—roughly a 12-to-1 ratio, significantly up from the 6-to-1 ratio he observed back in 2020.

The overwhelming majority of firms had fewer than 10% of their employees’ contribution money going to Republicans, and most of these firms saw less than 5% falling on the Republican side. Only six firms had at least 25% of their employees’ funds going to Republicans, and no Am Law 100 firms had a majority of contribution dollars going to Republicans. Compare this with Muller’s 2021 research—when more than 20 firms had at least 25% of employees’ contribution money going to Republicans, and three Am Law 100 firms had a majority of contribution dollars going to Republicans.

“This represents a pretty significant shift to the left,” Muller told me in an interview. What might explain it? After offering the caveat that this isn’t yet something he has researched, Muller raised two possibilities.

First, during the 2023–2024 period, Biden and Kamala Harris were incumbents. In a phenomenon some have dubbed “money following power,” incumbents tend to receive more campaign contributions—perhaps from donors hoping to curry favor with the current administration.

Second, the 2023–2024 period came after the riot at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In the wake of Jan. 6, dozens of prominent companies announced that they would be making changes to their political contributions. Some declared that they would withhold donations from the 147 members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election results, which disproportionately hurt Republicans. It’s reasonable to think that some Big Law attorneys might have followed the lead of their corporate clients by reducing their political giving to Republicans.

Still, even if the direction of the shift toward Democrats might have been predictable, the magnitude of the move was striking. As Muller told me, “I was surprised to see such a stark shift, in only four years.”

I asked Muller to predict what we might see if he repeats this research in 2029. With the disclaimer that offering predictions can be a risky business, he guessed that we’ll see a shift to the right, based on a few factors.

First, Republicans will be in the incumbent party in 2028, at least when it comes to the White House. So they could enjoy the financial benefits of incumbency, discussed above.

Second, some large law firms that reached settlements with the Trump administration witnessed dips in headcount—and at least anecdotally, we know that some of the departing lawyers were liberals or progressives unhappy over Trump deals. These attorneys took their campaign contributions with them—so to the extent that they donate heavily to Democrats, their dollars will no longer show up in surveys of Big Law political donations.

Muller offered one final reason why he expects Big Law campaign contributions to be less skewed toward the Democratic side in the next iteration of his research.

“It would be hard to get farther to the left.”

David Lat, a lawyer turned writer, publishes Original Jurisdiction. He founded Above the Law and Underneath Their Robes, and is author of the novel “Supreme Ambitions.”

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