Remember when a handful of Biglaw firms committed tens of millions of dollars in pro bono promises to the Trump administration causes hoping to trade some benign charitable work for a reprieve from potentially devastating White House retaliation?
BECAUSE THE FIRMS SURE DON’T!
The firms involved — Paul Weiss, Skadden, Willkie Farr, Milbank, Kirkland, Latham, Simpson, A&O Shearman, and Cadwalader — thought they were so clever: do some free legal work for veterans, avoid a potentially insurmountable executive order and protect their bottom lines. In reality, the executive order proved almost comically simple to defeat, the Trump administration publicly explained that the pro bono deal would include representing police in brutality cases, and deep-pocketed clients started dumping the firms to avoid the stench of cowardice.
If only someone had predicted this from the start!
Add in law school students pledging not to work with capitulating firms and law school administrations openly encouraging interviewees to consider these deals when making job decisions, and you can understand why the firms might be trying to get out from the mess they’ve created for themselves.
It turns out, they might be. Congressional Democrats wrote the firms asking some pointed questions about the nature of the deals and firms basically responded “What deals?” Sam Stein at The Bulwark has seen the responses and it seems the hot new trend this summer is claiming that those upwards of $125 million deals didn’t really mean anything at all:
In fairness, you’ve got to appreciate the work here. As Homer Simpson would say, “weaseling out of stuff is what separates us from the animals… except the weasel.”
“Complete independence” is just an outright lie. Assuming arguendo that the firm does not agree with the Trump administration’s repeated assertions that the deals functionally deputized the firms to make tariff deals or negotiate coal leases, the firms at the very least agreed to do some pro bono work that they otherwise hadn’t formally committed to perform. Not to get too pedantic about it, but that means the firm no longer has “complete independence.”
Anyone who did not, in fact, fall violently from the back of a turnip truck this morning can see through these sniveling responses. If they didn’t want to sign over the power to dictate or restrict pro bono matters, then they could have not made any pro bono commitments at all. Of course they intended to sign over their freedom to dictate what pro bono matters they take on! Granting them the benefit of the doubt, they presumably did so in a limited, negotiated fashion that the administration has shown zero interest in respecting, but it was a sacrifice of flexibility in any event. While technically true that there’s no indication that they agreed to “restrict” any pro bono matters, Biglaw firms aren’t made of money (regardless of how it may seem when reading the Am Law 100 numbers) and when they commit $125 million in free services to bucket A, they are necessarily restricting it from bucket B.
And that’s before we get into whether their pledges to vaguely reject “DEI” functions as a restriction on pro bono work. I’d imagine the White House would argue a lot of classical pro bono projects would violate that part of the deal.
Even if the firms never let Trump exercise these deals as a budget for miscellaneous agenda items, the firms’ pro bono initiatives are already altered.
The letter from A&O Shearman was perhaps the most detailed. It notes that “the Agreement” requires the firm to provide $125 million pro bono and other free legal services to “three specified areas” (emphasis ours). Those areas are assisting veterans and other public servants, ensuring fairness in our justice system, and combatting antisemitism. “The Agreement does not call for, or permit, the administration or any other person or entity to determine what clients and matters the Firm takes on, whether they be pro bono matters or otherwise,” the letter reads.
Well, “other public servants” is absolutely going to be the White House justification for using the firms in police brutality cases and probably its hook for making firms serve as Pam Bondi’s junior helpers for a whole host of other tasks. Trump has already claimed that the deals including defending him for free after he leaves office — that’s where the administration sees the term “public servants.”
It might seem nice that these firms are willing to put in writing that they don’t agree with the promises the White House very clearly thinks they made, but if none of these firms really believed they were giving any skin off their nose in these deals it’s actually worse. It means that they willingly agreed to be used as props for the administration to deploy to strongarm even more firms that resistance was futile and that they needed to swear fealty fast to get the best terms. As each firm gave in, they made it just a little bit harder for the next firm to stand up.
And now that they’re willing to say they don’t believe in the deals, what happens if they actually try to act that way. “It doesn’t take much to imagine Trump going nuclear after the firms he browbeat start declining to take on cases like police officers accused of excessive force or ICE officials sued for not following proper procedures,” Stein writes. When that happens, the firms making up the Order of Obsequious will just have to hope Perkins Coie and Jenner & Block have done all the necessary work to protect them from a future retaliatory order.
Let those firms burn resources fighting to protect our rights!
And then they’ll try to play this off like it never happened and say that they knew they weren’t really making a deal the whole time. But hopefully we’ll remember.
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.
