Matt Stoller, Monopoly Round-Up: The Democrats' Corporate Lawyers Get the Humiliation They Deserve, BIG, March 27, 2025.
In his opening paragraph Stoller points out: “Donald Trump got a major corporate law firm, pretty much the shadow Kamala Harris administration in waiting, to bend the knee.” And then: “For a long time, I’ve discussed a secret center of power in America, what is known as “Big Law,” a network of law firms who serve as a shadow government for the out-of-power party.”
After three paragraphs of history:
A few years ago, I spoke at the American Bar Association Antitrust Section, and observed the rage the gathered corporate lawyers felt towards anti-monopolists for barging into their club. While I noted at the time the legal elements of the disagreement, there’s a political element as well. These lawyers are the Democratic establishment, the real thinkers and operatives behind the frontmen like Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer and candidates like Kamala Harris and Barack Obama. [...]
A key firm in this network is Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a multi-billion dollar entity that is so politically connected its New York office served as the unofficial campaign headquarters for Kamala Harris’ campaign. Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries worked as an associate at Paul Weiss for six years (and has a donor network there), former Obama cabinet members Jeh Johnson and Loretta Lynch are partners, and so is Chuck Schumer’s brother. Sonya Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elana Kagan were summer associates. [...]
Paul Weiss is also legendary, started in the 19th century by New York Jews, then becoming a top tier law practice by the 1950s. [...]
Today, at $7.5 million in profit per partner in 2024, the fifth highest of major law firms, Paul Weiss is anchored by private equity titan Apollo Global Management, as well as Google, Amazon, and Apple. It reps nine of the top ten private equity firms. Just this week, it got a securities action against Amazon dismissed, advised Rocket Mortgage in buying Redfin, and helped engineer the roll-up of roofing in the $11 billion QXO/Beacon Roofing Supply deal. Its work spans the gamut of pro-corporate aggressive lawyering. Brad Karp, for instance, sent a letter opposing the Biden administration’s $8 cap on credit card late fees. It helped Verizon buy Frontier, did one of the largest private equity deals in China and as an internal investigator failed to catch one of the largest stock frauds in history. Paul Weiss is a firm unafraid of standing up to the government on behalf of its corporate or pro bono clients.
Trump moves in for the kill:
A week and a half ago, Donald Trump targeted Paul Weiss with an executive order stripping the firm of security clearances and business with the government, as well as potentially barring their lawyers from Federal courthouses. In addition, Trump implied he would penalize Paul Weiss’ clients. It’s a blatantly illegal order, the kind widely understood as an authoritarian move . It followed on Trump targeting two other big law firms, Covington and Burling and Perkins Coie, whose partners had engaged in partisan activity against the Republicans.
Threatening lawyers who represent clients opposed to the government is tin pot dictator stuff, meant to chill any opposition. So you would think that a politically wired firm would recognize that they have an ethical obligation, or even just a branding one, to oppose it. [...]
But in the case of Paul Weiss, that’s not what happened. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Competitors immediately began circling after the March 14 order, calling coveted Paul Weiss clients to note that the firm had been marked as an enemy of the president, according to people familiar with the conversations.” Within a few days, Brad Karp, the firm’s Chairman, sought to cut a deal with the Trump administration. Paul Weiss hired Bill Burck, the lawyer for indicted New York City mayor Eric Adams.
Shock and awe:
This capitulation shocked and horrified the legal world, inviting Trump to expand his attack on the legal community. The next day, Trump issued another executive order calling for the government to sanction lawyers who bring “frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious” lawsuits against the government. That’s a signal to the entire legal world that representing clients in disagreements with the government carries a personal and professional risk.
Along with a series of other actions, from stripping lawful residents of green cards for holding certain political views, and threatening to send U.S. citizens to prisons in El Salvador, there’s a political chill happening in America, reminiscent of the McCarthy era.
In this context, Paul Weiss’ immediate capitulation caused a lot of lawyers to despair. One way of seeing this dynamic is to ask the question: If this venerable law firm, which has the resources to fight and a legacy to protect, capitulates, then who else will? But the way I see this dynamic is that it merely reveals to everyone in Democratic politics what we’ve already known, which is that big law is a place of toxic anti-democratic sentiment. And the entire edifice of party politics, that fancy lawyers do the real governing work while shabby hacks handle the rabble during the elections, is a charade to hand over America to private equity and monopoly. [...]
But what should be crystal clear to everyone in politics is these lawyers aren’t just unethical, but are in many ways the reason that the Democratic Party is as enfeebled and pathetic as it seems to be. Big law is the brains of the Democrats, with the actual elected officials, often meek pleasers with little experience wielding real power, as ornaments who serve up slop on centrist and leftism and other meaningless terms. The alchemy of big law was always they way in which you seamlessly revolve in and out of government - the allure of making a lot of money and governing. That is what is shattering.
There's much more at the link. Though one wonders: Can these guys be replaced by AI? If so, who trains the AI? Who owns it?
