Earlier this month, DLA Piper attorneys in the U.S. discovered that their signature blocks had been edited, without any warning or notice, to scrub any mention of personal pronouns. In an unintentionally fitting memorialization, the firm’s “global search and replace” effort apparently failed to account for formatting, deleting the pronouns and, for some attorneys, leaving empty parentheses in the blocks to mark the erasure.
It appears to be the latest “obey in advance” streak afflicting the legal industry. Already, Biglaw firms have deleted diversity language from their websites and embarked on a chilling silence campaign in the wake of the administration’s retaliatory strike on Covington. With Trump raising the stakes in the assault on lawyers, weaponizing the EEOC against private law firm diversity efforts, it’s probably not the end of the cowering.
And it’s not just law firms because for every inspiring Georgetown dean letter telling the administration’s lackeys to pound sand, there are cowardly administrations like Vanderbilt or Cornell deleting diversity from their websites.
However, this seems to be the first universal effort to police individual email signatures. It marks a bold departure for DLA Piper, a firm that historically touted its pronoun policy. And it’s a move that seems tailored to appease the Trump administration because tipsters report that international attorneys have not seen their signatures adjusted behind their backs.
We reached out to DLA for comment but have not heard back.
The problem with a strategy of preemptive compliance with Trump is that it doesn’t actually matter. Consider Trump’s cancellation of hundreds of millions in grants to Columbia, ostensibly over pro-Palestinian protests on campus, even though Columbia’s administration invited the NYPD to make a brutal public spectacle of clearing out the protest and all they got in return was vilified by attention-seeking Federalist Society judges and its funding attacked.
If this game of avoiding the “Eye of Dumb Sauron” is so rarely fruitful, why even play? Firms may argue that they aren’t even trying to play games and that this is not about rolling over for the administration as much as an adjustment to reflect a shifting public consensus in light of the election. Or, perhaps more accurately, to reflect what their business community clients assume is a public consensus.
But this is, as they say, bullshit. The private sector doesn’t have to care about the electoral college, just the people. Donald Trump has run for president on this platform three times and not ONCE managed to get more people to vote for him than vote against him. Indeed, until last year’s 49 percent plurality, he’d never even managed to get more people to vote for him than for his highest profile opponent.
Law firms have no need to radically alter their human resources to meet the demands of 49 percent of the public that are never going to own a major Wall Street bank. In fact, law firms can keep billing clients like fiends while standing up for the better angels of our nature.
Which really makes you wonder why so many of them aren’t.
Standing up, I mean. I trust they’re still billing like fiends.
Earlier: Biglaw Firm Quietly Begins Purging Diversity Language From Website
Law Schools Respond To The Executive Threatening To Cut Federal Funding Over DEI
Trump Signs Executive Order Calling Out Top 50 Biglaw Firm, With Intent To Wage War Against Other ‘Leading Law Firms’ Over Their DEI Policies
Covington Must Wait Behind Putin To See Classified Documents Like Everyone Else
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
