You Can’t Seriously Be Shocked That Big Law Caved to Trump
I wasn’t surprised by Paul Weiss’s acquiescence to Trump, and neither were many of my Harvard Law School classmates, who joined together years ago to protest a series of Paul Weiss recruitment galas at law schools around the country. We were calling out the firm’s “blatantly obstructionist” work (as the Massachusetts attorney general called it) shielding ExxonMobil from accountability for its campaign to defraud the public about climate change—work that included the frequent use of SLAPP suits designed to censor, intimidate, and silence ExxonMobil’s opponents. But there were other, equally appalling examples of malfeasance by Paul Weiss that we could have been demonstrating against. The firm helped to win immunity for the Sackler family for their role in creating the nation’s opioid crisis, defended Big Tobacco giant Philip Morris in the racketeering case U.S. v. Philip Morris, fought for many of Wall Street’s most notorious criminals, shielded the NFL against its concussed players, helped subprime lenders evade liability for the housing foreclosure crisis, and represented the creditors holding Puerto Rico hostage.
Paul Weiss is not unique in this regard; the exact same story can be told about every other Big Law firm now joining Trump’s fascist front. Many Democrats expressed outrage when Neal Katyal’s firm, Milbank, committed $100 million in free legal services to the president’s authoritarian ventures, despite the image of Katyal—a former acting solicitor general under President Obama and legal analyst for MSNBC—as a self-proclaimed leader of the #Resistance. But the reality is that Katyal already had a record representing monstrous causes. This is the guy who, in order to win immunity for U.S. corporations that abetted child slavery, cited as a worthy legal precedent the failure of Nuremberg prosecutors to prosecute “the firm that supplied Zyklon B gas, which the Nazis used to kill millions.”
When criticized for this kind of work, corporate lawyers inevitably fall back on the same defense—that “everyone deserves a lawyer.” Big Law partners regularly compare themselves to John Adams, who in 1770 risked his reputation and livelihood to represent the British soldiers charged with firing on colonists in the Boston Massacre. In his old age, Adams called this defense “one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.” Many corporate lawyers cast their advocacy for massive corporations in the same light.
