The WAMU podcast 1A put on an excellent show Monday on the White House threats against law firms.
The show featured Princeton University Professor Deborah Pearlstein, Politico reporter Josh Gerstein, and Elias Law Group Chair Marc Elias.
Highlights for me:
- Pearlstein questioned the ethics of the firms that have caved to Administration pressure. How can a client trust Paul Weiss to provide zealous representation, she asked, when the firm so readily caves to political pressure?
- Elias called the deals struck by Paul Weiss and Skadden, inter alia and respectively $40 million and $100 million payoffs in legal services, "cowardly" and "obscene" and questioned whether the practice of law should continue to be protected by the exclusivity of licensing.
Agreed and agreed. I suggest moreover that the weakness of the legal profession and its willingness to sell out for the bottom line has been the American way already for decades. That Big Law has locked down the profession and lobbies anti-competitively to keep it that way—thereby denying access to legal services, legal education, and legal careers to ordinary Americans, while building and bolstering an anti-democratic corporatocracy—is nothing new to those of us who toil away on the hamster wheels beneath the status ceiling.
It's simply Trump's shameless gambit that has exposed the rot.
In the less cowardly vein, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale (Court Listener), and Jenner & Block (Court Listener) are litigating against the executive orders targeting law firms. I anticipate signing on to an amicus brief of law professors in support of the plaintiff motion for summary judgment in the Perkins Coie matter in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Update, Apr. 3: Law Professors' Amicus Brief in Perkins Coie v. DOJ (D.D.C. filed Apr. 3, 2025).
