It took six weeks for the German Army to trample over France. In roughly the same period, President Donald Trump scattered his biggest legal opponents into disarray by issuing over a hundred executive orders. The key to both victories, although short-lived for one and still to be decided for Trump, was having a plan and executing it quickly.
Trump had two well-funded research and planning organizations draw up what he wanted to accomplish and execute it through the legal process. These would be the Heritage Foundation (see How Trump Would Destroy the Deep State)and AFPI ( see Fifth Column: The Right Wing Think Tank behind Subversion of the Justice Department ).
Trump’s executive orders deny his opponents the right to choose the best counsel provided by aggressive liberal law firms in future court battles. Ellen Podgor, a Stetson University law professor and legal ethicist, told CNN, “We’ve never seen a president put out a specific order about a law firm.” She sees Trump as “depriving our whole right to counsel. This is a major amendment to our Constitution.”
Some law firms got Trump to withdraw his draconian orders by agreeing to some infringements on their lawyering. They just had to (collectively) donate about a billion dollars in legal fees that support Trump’s conservative agenda.
Recognizing Trump’s wins, lead White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, gloated by telling the media, “Big Law continues to bend the knee to President Trump because they know they were wrong, and he looks forward to putting their pro bono legal concessions toward implementing his America First agenda.”
Why are the big law firms significant?
With the Republican Party controlling Congress, it is doubtful that it will restrain presidential executive orders that ignore fundamental constitutional rights. If the Republican Party remains mute, it will legitimize future liberal or conservative presidents issuing executive orders that bypass or violate Congressional and judicial constraints.
While Trump appointees do not dominate the entire court system, his ideological allies control the Supreme Court, which he anticipates will overturn district court decisions. Only a few Trump-appointed judges have ruled against his orders to date.
Appealing to the judicial system to apply the laws that limit or deny certain assumed presidential powers, relies heavily on having a fair opportunity to present a robust case before any judge. This requires time and money. The most prominent law firms spearhead many significant cases that set precedents. Furthermore, the liberal firms have taken the lead in challenging the legality of his decisions. Therefore, Trump needed to declare war on them before they lawyered up if he wanted to enact his MAGA agenda.
Fear of Bankruptcy
Trump may not be a fan of William Shakespeare’s plays, but he could sympathize with Jack Cade, who seeks to overthrow Henry VI by agreeing that the first thing to do “is kill all the lawyers.” Trump would not go that far, but he would stomp them into bankruptcy if he could.
Fearing financial disasters, prominent firms that have challenged Trump’s policies and actions in the past have reached settlements with him. However, critics and firms fighting Trump’s orders consider these “settlements” more akin to extortion to avoid bankruptcy due to extreme penalties based on no evidence of wrongdoing by those firms.
The capitulation of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison provides a stark example of how the fear of Trump’s denial of government resources punishes his court opponents. Paul, Weiss is considered one of the most liberal firms, with a long history of leading court fights for civil rights.
Many of its firm members are Democrats. Brad Karp, Paul, Weiss’s chairman for the last two decades, hosted a “Lawyers for Biden” fund-raiser in 2023. He had also called on major law firms in “a call to arms” to fight Mr. Trump in court on various issues.
Then, Trump issued his Executive Order directing his Attorney General and other executive departments to suspend any active security clearances held by individuals at Paul, Weiss, terminate any contracts with Paul, Weiss or with entities that disclose doing business with Paul, Weiss, and limit official access to Federal Government buildings for Paul, Weiss employees.
New York Times reporters assessed these restrictions, determining they could have led to the firm hemorrhaging clients and lawyers. In essence, Trump was wielding a financial punishment large enough to ruin one of his fiercest legal opponents. This was roughly the same threat that other firms succumbed to in avoiding financial calamity. In the Paul, Weiss case, Karp talked to some of the firm’s 200 partners to weigh their options and received majority support to settle to get Trump to withdraw the Executive Order.
At the University of Washington, Professor Scott Radnitz made a relevant observation in an interview with Seattle Times columnist Naomi Ishisaka. He found that Trump’s primary lever for threatening his most powerful foes is withholding money. This contrasts with other autocrats using physical and mortal threats to get people to bend.
I add that, like any other business in the market economy, a legal profession is in trouble if you destroy its product. If a law firm can’t sell its legal advice to those in need, its value plummets. Even the cost of fighting the federal government with an eventual partial win is enough of a threat to seek immediate relief.
Radnitz and other political scientists “have found it shocking how quickly and rapidly and easily so many institutions, independent of the government, have given in to Trump’s demands.”
Their capitulations may seem minor initially; however, they are designed to move the firm’s activity from obstructing Trump to supporting his agenda.
Settlement Demands to gut law firms’ missions.
After accusing the Biden administration of weaponizing the government to investigate and unfairly accuse him of unconstitutional or illegal behavior, he is now weaponizing the government to make those charges against select individuals and firms who were involved in those efforts.
On his first day in office, Trump issued Executive Order 14147 of January 20, 2025 (Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government). Its general goal of not using discriminatory federal power is sensible. However, Trump cites it in every Executive Order sent to law firms to justify the settlements they must accept before he removes those orders.
The settlements require firms to rebuke their DEI efforts in their offices and possibly as issues to defend in court. This demand is made as a matter of national interest to stop racial discrimination. But the implications of these demands go much deeper.
For instance, firms cannot use political affiliations to determine who to hire. Trump is drawing a parallel between discrimination against conservative attorneys and discrimination against racial minorities. By agreeing to these settlements, the firms may leave themselves open to repeated federal scrutiny that they could be breaking civil rights laws by only supporting groups that oppose Trump’s MAGA beliefs. That effort could have Trump’s Attorney General charge the firm with discriminating against the groups they are not representing.
Firms agreed in all settlements to spend hundreds of millions on free legal services for what they saw as uncontroversial causes. However, Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, thinks they are short-sighted if “they thought they made one-shot deals which they would fulfill.”
Koh believes that, based on Trump’s early statements, “the administration seems to think that they have subjected these firms to indentured servitude.” Rather than representing groups suffering from Trump’s policies, they could be called upon to defend his allies who benefit from them. The NYT reporters investigating Trump’s orders and how he described the settlements concluded that Trump has hinted at seeing the promises of pro bono legal services as a legal war chest to be used as he wishes.
Ever mindful of how to shape public opinion, Trump released his version of the settlements on his social media platform, Truth Social. His is not necessarily the interpretation of what the firms thought they had agreed to. Brad Karp found significant differences in Trump’s description of Paul Weiss’s settlement. Karp informed his partners that he had not agreed to abandon DEI, nor had he agreed that former law partner Mark Pomerantz, the lead prosecutor in the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, had done anything wrong.
The uncertainty surrounding the existence of formal contracts has left law firms on edge. They are unsure whether the attorney general will pursue them if Trump accuses them of failing to comply with the settlement. Karp and other law firm leaders who settled with Trump assert that their agreements effectively codified work their firms have already been doing. They are about to discover that Trump will expect them to support groups and issues they have never represented, nor would they have.
Some Firms and Most Courts are Challenging Trump’s Actions
Five law firms are counter-suing Trump, and the district courts have temporarily halted his orders. In addition, the American Bar Association has organized its associations to file an amicus brief in support of the law firms. Ultimately, SCOTUS will decide which portions, if any, of the orders are legally valid.
One should understand how those resisting Trump’s actions rely on laws, court rulings, and historical norms that protect our democratic republic from drifting into an autocratic government. That effort requires a straightforward review of Trump’s specific demands on these firms and their rebuttals. This review must also consider the politics and history surrounding how this conflict affects our society.
