The bare-knuckled tactics of Trump 2.0 have brought some once-mighty companies and institutions to their knees.
Many of the nation’s most prominent places of higher education such as Columbia University improbably have agreed in the face of federal funding threats to Trump administration demands on how they deal with dissent on their campuses and even what courses to offer in certain disciplines.
Industries, including automakers, have been subject to Trumpian threats if they raise prices even in the face of substantial increases in their costs due to the president’s obsession with tariffs. We have yet to see how those companies respond when they face the inevitable choice between substantial decline in profitability and Donald Trump’s wrath.
But perhaps no institution has come under more duress in the three months since Trump began his second term than the legal profession.
Some of the country’s biggest law firms — from Paul Weiss to Skadden Arps — have struck deals with the administration to provide hundreds of millions collectively in free legal work for causes Trump favors. They did so after Trump signed executive orders terminating federal contracts for their services and removing security clearances for their attorneys or threatened to do so. Kirkland & Ellis, the nation’s largest firm, headquartered in Chicago, is reportedly facing similar threats and is said to be negotiating with the administration.
These executive orders almost certainly are unconstitutional, but the firms that have capitulated clearly have made the decision that their businesses were too much at risk to fight. The fear is understandable. Some major corporate clients needing legal representation may not wait to see if the law firm to which it’s paying hourly rates in the high hundreds will manage to extricate itself from a Trump-ordered federal freeze-out. These lawyers well know those clients may just find a firm not so entangled.
Thankfully, a few firms have chosen differently, led by Chicago-based Jenner & Block, a corporate citizen of our city for over a century.
Jenner has won a temporary restraining order against Trump’s absurd March 25 executive order targeting the firm for having the temerity to hire a lawyer years ago who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump. That attorney, Andrew Weissmann, left Jenner in 2021.
Jenner now is seeking to have the executive order thrown out.
“These orders send a clear message to the legal profession: Cease certain representations adverse to the government and renounce the Administration’s critics — or suffer the consequences,” Jenner’s April 8 brief in support of motion for summary judgment states.
We’ll translate what Jenner is saying: lawyers are being ordered to bend the knee.
It’s no accident Trump has targeted law firms so aggressively. In the first two years of Trump’s first term, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, it was lawyers and judges who proved to be among the strongest roadblocks to the president’s policy goals.
Apart from Trump’s clearly articulated desire for revenge against people and institutions he feels have wronged him, there’s a more nefarious double-pronged strategy at work in this attack on Big Law. The first is that with every settlement, each of which features a pledge to perform free legal work on causes approved by the administration, the president’s team is amassing an army of the best, most well-compensated attorneys in America to fight its battles in court.
At an event Tuesday in which Trump promised to revive the U.S. coal industry, the president said, “Have you noticed that lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump?”
Speaking to coal industry representatives, the president said, “We’re going to use some of those firms to work with you on your leasing and your other things.”
Helping producers of some of the most polluting energy sources on Earth gain more access to federal lands and challenge environmental restrictions isn’t what comes first to mind for most folks when they think of the rightful beneficiaries of pro bono legal services. But here we are.
Secondly, the assaults on the nation’s biggest law firms — and the quick surrenders by many of them — have a potentially chilling effect on all firms’ decisions of whether to help certain kinds of clients even if they’re willing and able to pay for these firms’ services. Trump has demonstrated that he will seek to punish firms for representing clients he doesn’t like.
The rule of law in the U.S. — with foundations based on centuries of progress in Britain forged through battles between subjects and monarchs over what constitutes a fair and just society — is the envy of the world for good reason. A critical underpinning of justice in America is the right to counsel — and the freedom of lawyers to zealously represent any client, no matter how unpopular, distasteful or out of favor with the powers that be.
That’s what’s at stake in this unprecedented attempt by a U.S. president to gain control of this vital cog in our civic workings. Jenner & Block — along with Perkins Coie and WilmerHale, which also are combating Trump’s pressure games — is on the right side in this fight and should be commended for its courage. The remainder of Jenner’s peers who haven’t already capitulated should follow the lead of these three.
There’s strength in numbers.
