You Cannot Appease Someone Who Intends to Destroy You
The BigLaw firms that rolled over to Trump are astonished to learn that he might not have been negotiating in good faith.
Last month, the law firm of Paul Weiss struck a deal with the White House, promising to donate $40 million in pro bono legal services to Trump-approved causes in order to avoid a cartoonishly unconstitutional executive order targeting the firm and its clients. Shortly thereafter, the firm’s chair, Brad Karp, assured any Paul Weiss lawyers feeling wary about getting conscripted to fight the Republican Party’s culture wars that—great news!—they had nothing to worry about.
“To be clear, and to clarify misinformation perpetuated from various media sources, the Administration is not dictating what matters we take on, approving our matters, or anything like that,” Karp wrote in a firmwide email. “We obviously would not, and could not ethically, have agreed to that.” Instead, he wrote, Paul Weiss would merely work on three specific “areas of shared interest” with the administration: “assisting our Nation’s veterans,” “countering anti-Semitism,” and “promoting the fairness of the justice system.” Otherwise, he said, Paul Weiss would “continue all of the existing pro bono work we already do.”
In a development that will surprise no one except, apparently, Brad Karp, the Trump administration understood his terms of surrender much differently. According to The New York Times, the president has privately suggested in recent weeks that he has the authority to deputize Paul Weiss, along with other firms that waved the white flag, to hash out trade deals on the administration’s behalf, provide support to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, or assist the Department of Government Efficiency gremlins working to dismantle the parts of government that make Elon Musk marginally less wealthy. White House officials have even floated the possibility of tasking these firms with providing free legal counsel to Trump and/or his allies should they become “ensnared in investigations,” which has been, historically speaking, a pretty safe bet.
Per the Times, Paul Weiss was not the only firm whose leadership downplayed the significance of their capitulations when communicating the news internally. One, for example, told colleagues that the firm would remain “completely free” to choose whether to work on “any particular pro bono matter,” and another characterized the subjects of the contemplated pro bono collaborations as causes that the White House and the firm “both support.”
But as I wrote at the time, Trump viewed these agreements not as final, good-faith resolutions of his various grievances, but as tools for identifying the firms that value their dignity less than their continued presence in the upper echelon of annual profits per partner rankings. In retrospect, perhaps people who bill their time at $2,000 per hour should have considered the possibility that “deals” negotiated in a Washington steakhouse by Trump’s personal lawyer, who recently pleaded not guilty to state criminal charges related to attempts to steal the 2020 election, might not be sufficient to persuade the administration to forevermore leave them alone.
For these firms that elected not to challenge the executive orders targeting them, there is no good outcome from here. If they go along with whatever Trump demands of them, they will risk alienating their paying clients and losing even more lawyers than they already have. On the other hand, if they are suddenly able to summon the courage to argue, for example, that boosting the Justice Department’s efforts to disappear people to overseas gulags is inconsistent with their professional obligation to provide free legal services to “persons of limited means,” Trump will gleefully declare the firms to be in breach of their agreement, and drop an even more punitive version of the executive orders of which the firms were so terrified in the first place.
Karp and his peers are aware of Trump’s grand plans for the future of their working relationships, but as the Times puts it, they are now stuck “just hoping” the president will not follow through. As any lawyer will tell you, a classic sign that you negotiated an ironclad out-of-court settlement is the newspaper of record reporting that one month later, the opposing party is convening meetings to decide which big-ticket concessions to extract from you next.
When Trump initiated his attacks on the legal profession—a time-honored strategy among autocrats looking to neuter meaningful opposition—these firms assumed that by making vague promises to keep doing pro bono work they were ostensibly already doing, they could pacify the president, or at least redirect his fury at someone else. Instead, they branded themselves as vassals of his administration, whose (relative) positions of privilege depend entirely on their continued willingness to follow his orders, no matter how humiliating, untenable, or impossible compliance may get. I am not sure what will happen to the firms trying to wriggle their way out of this predicament, but I am sure they will deserve it.
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Educated derelicts, seems they don't really understand history either or what really happens with capitulation