Experts warn law firms not to cave to Trump 'in the throes of the greatest legal disaster' in history

09 May

President Donald Trump in the White House on March 26, 2025 (Wikimedia Commons)

Slate writers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern say lawyers who capitulated to Trump to keep “the money flowing” have not only put their clients at risk but are unserious about their jobs.

When President Donald Trump launched “patently unconstitutional” executive orders at wealthy law firms to punish them for hiring or representing Trump’s perceived enemies, some of them took a possibly illegal deal and pledged about a billion dollars “in pro bono work for the Trump administration while purging their diversity programs."

Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell handed down a massive victory for firms like Perkins Coie, who fought the president’s executive order. But Howell also went out of her way to question the ethics of firms that surrendered early and took Trump’s deal.

Howell described Trump’s Executive Order 4230 as “Let’s kill the lawyers I don’t like,” and said “This message has been heard and heeded by some targeted law firms, as reflected in their choice ... to agree to demand terms, perhaps viewing this choice as the best alternative for their clients and employees.”

But some clients, she noted, may rightfully “harbor reservations about the implications of such deals for the vigorous and zealous representation to which they are entitled from ethically responsible counsel.” This, write Lithwick and Stern, is “an extraordinary warning to these clients that their lawyers may no longer be defending their best interests.”

Some clients are already taking this advice to heart. A few days ago Microsoft dumped a law firm that took one of Trump’s deals and replaced them with one of the firms that refused.

But there’s a larger context, says Slate, one involving the efficacy of the nation’s rule of law and the value of its front-line soldiers in defending it.

“The days of ‘I just do mergers and acquisitions’ are behind us, sports fans,” write Lithwick and Stern. “If America were experiencing a national tooth-decay crisis, the dentists would be on the front lines; and were it experiencing a sweeping leaky-pipe epidemic, the plumbers would be on the front lines. Given that we are in the throes of the greatest legal disaster the country has faced in many Americans’ lifetimes, it might be a good idea for the nation’s attorneys to begin to understand that they have a role to play too.”

Judge Howell, they warn, “holds no quarter for those who would seek to be neutral. If you have the tools to fight lawlessness and you opt not to use them at this moment in history, you are emphatically still taking a side.”

Read the full Slate report at this link.

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