How Will History Remember Trump’s Big Law Firms?

While President Donald Trump’s attempts to discredit an election he lost turned violent Wednesday, there once were several Big Law firms backing his cause.

Many who once supported the president have now distanced themselves from him, including those big firms. It’s likely these firms will now be able to move on without scrutiny, experts say, but that doesn’t mean their role should be minimized.

“But just as people exercising First Amendment rights to speak their minds may suffer consequences when their views are toxic, law firms that represent bad actors must accept the consequences when their clients are toxic,” legal consultant Tim Corcoran said.

The insurrection by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol building Wednesday has made it clear the end goal of Trump and his close allies’ post-election attacks and litigation: to overturn a free and fair election that has yet to produce any of the litany of fraud claims Trump has touted.

The chaos was met with horror from the legal community, many of which immediately called for Congress to invoke the 25th Amendment or impeach the president, who will remain in office for two more weeks.

“Any law firms that helped with election litigation, make no mistake, aided and abetted the insurrection,” said Aidan Ryan, a communications consultant for Goldberg Segalla.

Turning back the clock two months, immediately following the November 2020 election, several firms representing Trump or the GOP brought forth various claims of fraud, irregularities or mail-in ballot issues, including Big Law firms Jones Day, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur and Snell & Wilmer. None of those three firms responded to a request for comment Thursday.

These firms’ involvement in the litigation led to immense public outcry online and, in some cases, even in-person. Activists camped outside their offices, holding signs like “Stop the GOP Coup” and “Jones Day is killing democracy for profit.”

Perhaps the most high-profile online actor, The Lincoln Project, told its 2.7 million followers to harass firm attorneys on LinkedIn and vowed to put pressure on major corporate clients such as General Motors.

Individual lawyers at Foley & Lardner and Fox Rothschild also lent a hand to Trump’s efforts, including longtime GOP attorney Cleta Mitchell who recently resigned from Foley after leaked audio from a conversation between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger identified her as counsel to the president.

Fox Rothschild attorney Alex Kaufman was also on that call, the firm confirmed, though the firm stressed that Kaufman was acting in a personal capacity as general counsel for the Fulton County Republican Party and an associate general counsel for the Georgia Republican Party.

After the public pressure mounted, several firms distanced themselves from Trump—or, in the cases of Foley and Fox, from their own attorneys who were associated with the president’s efforts.

Snell & Wilmer and Porter Wright withdrew from their cases in November, although there may have been more playing into that decision than the public relations offensives alone.

The fact that most Big Law firms withdrew in November, months before Wednesday’s insurrection, distances their brands from the events at the Capitol, said Keith Wetmore, managing director of the San Francisco office for legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa and chief executive partner of Morrison & Foerster from 2000 through 2012.

“Life is long, politics is short. And, again, the legal card game has been over. People folded their hands several weeks ago. The fact is that that Trump raised the stakes, but nobody is sitting at the table with him. The law firms have moved on,” Wetmore said.

Even so, will the role these firms played affect their reputations with and attorneys and clients once The Lincoln Project moves on and the dust settles?

Corcoran says it likely will not. For wealthy and high performing firms like Jones Day, there will be no shortage of attorneys and clients who will overlook the representation.

“Some may enact policies forbidding such clients in the future. Some may issue tone deaf admonishments that all clients deserve representations,” Corcoran said in an email. “But I don’t expect much to change in the long run. Because money talks.”

Damage to recruiting and clients will likely be marginal, experts say, because of the culture separating attorneys from their clients.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be the case, Corcoran argued. But ”For some of these firms, the boardroom conversation will not focus on the importance of the rule of law. The conversation will focus solely on the risk/reward ratio of accepting toxic clients in return for large fees, of allowing partners to represent toxic clients in return for the notoriety it brings the firm.”

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison managing partner Brad Karp, whose firm has faced protests by law students over its representations of fossil fuel clients, also sees a distinction between the election challenges and a typical controversial client, especially for many of the attorneys who took on Trump’s even more outrageous and flimsy “Kraken” cases.

“I believe lawyers should be able to represent an individual or a company in controversial matters, no matter how unpopular the cause, so long as the positions taken are grounded in fact and law,” Karp said. “That said, lawyers—just like the President, Senators and Congressmen—should be held accountable if they peddle baseless and seditious positions that undermine our democracy, positions that provoked yesterday’s despicable coup.”

Legal consultant Kent Zimmermann, who advises Am Law 100 firms on a host of issues, said several law firms are looking to use the current controversy to drive a wedge between a desired lateral attorney and their current firm—encouraging them to vote with their feet about their firm’s stance on taking such a client.

The effort is nuanced and often not explicit, he added, and is mostly being adopted as a way to identify who may be likely to leave. For example, they’re looking up campaign contributions to see which candidate a potential lateral supported in the election.

Still, Zimmermann admitted that he doesn’t know how effective the effort would be. He generally agrees with Corcoran: Jones Day, Porter Wright and others will likely see little impact on their firms. Large firms are too diversified and will not rise and fall based on a couple of lost clients and attorneys.

“Sought-after laterals want usually two things. They want to be paid roughly what they command on the open market and want to be on a winning team for what they do,” he said. “I think there might be some firms that might lose out around the margins on some people and some clients who disagree with the role they played in 2020. But I think it’s going to be around the margins and I don’t think it’s really going to move the needle.”

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