The courtroom on the sixth floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse was not built for drama, but it got some anyway. It was mid March 2025, and Judge Beryl A. Howell had in front of her a lawsuit that read like nothing the District of Columbia’s docket had seen. A sitting president had signed an order aimed at a single law firm by name. The firm had sued to make it stop. And the lawyer at the government’s table was being asked, more or less, to defend the proposition that the White House could pick a private firm out of a lineup and try to end it.
Howell was not gentle.
She granted a temporary restraining order against most of the executive order that same day, calling the government’s position one that sent a chill down her spine. What followed over the next several months was the strangest chapter in the modern history of the American bar: some of the largest and most decorated firms in the country deciding, one by one, whether to stand and litigate or kneel and negotiate. A few fought. Several paid. The choices they made are still rearranging how lawyers think about the word independence.
The order that named a firm
On March 6, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order with a title that told you everything: “Addressing Risks from Perkins Coie LLP.” Perkins Coie is a large Seattle-founded firm with a heavy political practice, and its sin, in the administration’s telling, was its past. The firm had employed Marc Elias, the Democratic election lawyer, and it had been the conduit for payments that eventually funded opposition research on Trump during the 2016 campaign. The order recited that history and then reached for the levers of federal power.
The mechanics were blunt. Security clearances held by Perkins Coie lawyers were to be suspended pending review. Federal agencies were directed to terminate contracts with the firm and to require government contractors to disclose any business they did with it. Access to federal buildings was to be limited. Government officials were told to restrict engagement with the firm’s personnel. For a practice that lives on clearances, contracts, and the ordinary ability to walk into an agency and represent a client, this was a threat to the throat.
Perkins Coie did not blink. It retained Williams & Connolly, a firm with a bare-knuckle reputation, and filed Perkins Coie LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice, No. 25-cv-716 (D.D.C. 2025). The complaint framed the order as retaliation for protected speech and association, a punishment imposed without any process, and an attack on the right of clients to choose their own counsel. It invoked the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment’s due process guarantee, and the Sixth Amendment’s promise of counsel.
The administration had built a machine, and Perkins Coie was the first firm fed into it. It would not be the last.
What the orders were designed to do
To understand why some firms fought and others folded, you have to understand what the orders actually did to a business, because the legal theory and the commercial reality were two different animals.
On paper, an executive order stripping clearances and canceling contracts hits a firm’s government-facing work. In practice, it hit everything. A national security lawyer who cannot hold a clearance cannot do the job. A litigation partner who cannot enter a federal building cannot appear before an agency. A corporate client with federal contracts, reading a directive that its outside counsel might have to be disclosed and scrutinized, starts wondering whether keeping that firm is worth the aggravation. The orders were engineered to make a firm radioactive to its own clients.
The template repeated with variations. Covington & Burling drew an earlier February 2025 memorandum that pulled clearances from lawyers connected to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s work. Then came the named executive orders in a cluster:
- Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, targeted on March 14, 2025, with the order pointing to Mark Pomerantz, a former partner who had worked on the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of Trump.
- Jenner & Block, targeted March 25, 2025, with the order singling out Andrew Weissmann, a former partner who had served on Robert Mueller’s team.
- WilmerHale, targeted March 27, 2025, the firm where Mueller himself had returned to practice.
- Susman Godfrey, targeted April 9, 2025, a trial powerhouse that had won a defamation verdict connected to 2020 election falsehoods.
The pattern was legible to anyone who cared to read it. Each firm had a connection to an investigation of the president, a case against his allies, or a client on the wrong side of his politics. The government’s stated rationale leaned on national security and on a claim that these firms had weaponized the justice system. The firms read the orders as a bill of attainder in modern dress.
Then the machine did something its designers may not have fully war-gamed. It offered exits.
The firms that made a deal
Paul Weiss folded first, and it folded fast.
Within a week of being named, the firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, negotiated directly with the White House. On March 20, 2025, the administration announced that the order against Paul Weiss would be rescinded. In exchange, the firm agreed to a package that included roughly forty million dollars in pro bono legal services devoted to causes the administration favored, along with commitments about merit-based hiring and a disavowal of certain diversity practices.
Karp then did something that guaranteed the deal would be studied for years. He explained himself in writing to his own partners, and the message got out.
“We initially prepared to challenge the executive order in court, and a team of Paul, Weiss attorneys immediately began preparing a lawsuit,” Karp wrote. But it had become clear, he continued, that even a winning lawsuit would leave the firm bleeding, because the order “could easily have destroyed our firm.” He wrote that rival firms were “aggressively soliciting our clients” and trying to hire away the firm’s lawyers.
Read that again. The chairman of one of the most profitable firms in the world was saying, in plain language, that the danger was not losing in court. The danger was the market. Other firms, he was telling his partners, were circling like they smelled blood. The threat that broke Paul Weiss was partly the executive order and partly the willingness of its peers to profit from its distress.
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom did not even wait to be named. On March 28, 2025, Skadden announced a preemptive arrangement with the White House: a commitment of at least one hundred million dollars in pro bono work aligned with agreed priorities, plus assurances on hiring, in return for staying off the target list entirely. The firm’s leadership defended it as protecting clients and employees. Critics inside and outside the firm called it paying protection money to a threat that had not yet arrived.
The dam broke. Over the following weeks a procession of elite firms cut similar deals, most in the one-hundred-million-dollar range of committed pro bono value:
- Milbank
- Willkie Farr & Gallagher
- Kirkland & Ellis
- Latham & Watkins
- A&O Shearman
- Simpson Thacher & Bartlett
- Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft
By the time the counting slowed, the total pro bono value pledged across these arrangements approached one billion dollars. Nine firms, roughly nine hundred forty million dollars in promised services, all directed toward causes the administration blessed, all extracted under the shadow of an order that might arrive if the check did not clear, so to speak.
The deals were vague where it counted. What exactly did a firm owe? Who decided whether a pro bono project qualified? Could the White House call a firm and ask it to represent a particular cause? The public terms answered almost none of this, which is part of what made lawyers outside the deals so uneasy. An open-ended obligation to a political principal is the sort of thing a first-year associate is taught to spot and kill in a contract. Here it was the deal.
The firms that went to court
Four firms said no. And here the story turns, because the ones who fought did not lose. They ran the table.
Perkins Coie was the pathfinder. After Judge Howell’s temporary restraining order in March, the case marched toward a decision on the merits, and on May 2, 2025, she issued a memorandum opinion that ran past a hundred pages and read like a warning shot at the whole enterprise. She struck the order down in full. She held that it violated the First Amendment by retaliating against protected speech and association, the Fifth Amendment by imposing punishment without any semblance of due process, and the Sixth Amendment by interfering with the right of clients to be represented by counsel of their choosing.
Howell opened with a line of Shakespeare that lawyers love to quote out of context, the one about killing all the lawyers, and turned it against the order. Her point was that a healthy legal system depends on advocates who can take unpopular sides, and that punishing a firm for the clients it kept and the positions it took was the sort of move a functioning democracy is supposed to forbid. She wrote that no prior president had issued orders like these.
Jenner & Block filed Jenner & Block LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice, No. 25-cv-916 (D.D.C. 2025), and drew Judge John D. Bates, a George W. Bush appointee whose conservative bona fides were not in question. On May 23, 2025, Bates granted the firm summary judgment and permanently enjoined the order. His opinion did not hedge. He described the order as an act of retaliation that made no secret of its motive, and he found that it ran headlong into core constitutional protections. When a Bush-appointed judge tells you that a Republican president’s order against a law firm is flatly unconstitutional, the ruling carries a signal beyond its holding.
WilmerHale went next, in Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP v. Executive Office of the President, No. 25-cv-917 (D.D.C. 2025). Judge Richard J. Leon, also a Bush appointee, issued his decision on May 27, 2025, and permanently blocked the order. Leon’s opinion was emphatic to the point of typographic flourish, and its logic tracked the others: retaliation for protected advocacy, punishment without process, an unconstitutional strike at the client’s right to counsel.
Susman Godfrey completed the sweep. In Susman Godfrey LLP v. Executive Office of the President, No. 25-cv-1107 (D.D.C. 2025), Judge Loren L. AliKhan granted the firm summary judgment and permanently enjoined the order on June 27, 2025. Four firms, four lawsuits, four permanent injunctions, delivered by judges appointed by presidents of both parties. The government’s record in defending these orders on the merits was zero for four.
The firms that fought were not martyrs looking for a cause. Susman Godfrey is a litigation shop; fighting is the business. Jenner and WilmerHale had partners who had been personally named and who had reputations tied to the very investigations that provoked the orders. For them, capitulation would have meant conceding that the work they were proudest of was the reason they deserved punishment. They chose the fight because the fight was the only answer that let them keep looking at themselves.
The amicus brief that told you who was afraid
There is a document in the Perkins Coie litigation that says more about the profession than any single ruling. It is the friend-of-the-court brief filed on behalf of the firm, signed by more than five hundred law firms who wanted the court to know the order was dangerous to all of them.
Five hundred sounds like solidarity. Look closer and it reads like fear.
Because the firms that signed were overwhelmingly small and midsize. The largest, richest firms in the country, the ones whose names sit atop every profitability ranking, mostly stayed off it. Some had already cut their own deals and could hardly turn around and sign a brief calling those deals a constitutional outrage. Others simply did not want their names on a filing that opposed the White House. The brief that was supposed to show the bar standing together instead drew a map of who could afford courage and who had decided courage was a luxury.
The American Bar Association issued statements condemning the orders and defending the independence of the profession. Law school deans and clinical professors wrote letters. Retired judges spoke up. But the entities with the most money and the most to lose, the BigLaw partnerships whose leverage might have actually changed the calculus, were the quietest voices in the room. The imbalance was hard to miss and harder to forget.
I spoke over the course of that spring, informally, with lawyers at several targeted and deal-making firms. The refrain from the deal side was always some version of the same sentence: we have a fiduciary duty to our partners and our people, and we could not gamble the firm on a principle. The refrain from the fight side was also a single sentence: if we pay this, what exactly are we the next time they call?
Both sentences are true. That is what made the season so bleak.
What a clearance is really worth
It helps to sit for a moment with the specific instrument the orders used, because the security clearance is where the coercion did its quietest work.
A clearance is not a nicety. For a firm with a national security practice, or a white-collar defense group that handles matters touching classified information, or a government-contracts team that lives inside the federal procurement world, the ability of its lawyers to hold clearances is the difference between having a practice and not. Suspend the clearances and you have not merely inconvenienced a firm. You have told a whole category of its clients that this firm can no longer do the work you hired it to do.
That is why the clearance provisions were the sharpest part of the orders and why the courts spent real time on them. A clearance suspension carries the color of a national security judgment, an area where courts traditionally give the executive branch enormous room. The administration’s bet, I think, was that dressing retaliation in security language would buy deference. The judges did not take the bait. They looked at the sequence, the named firms, the recited grievances, and concluded that the security label was a costume over a punishment. Once you see the order as retaliation for protected activity, the deference argument collapses, because the government does not get to launder a First Amendment violation through the vocabulary of clearances.
The firms that settled, though, could not wait for a court to reach that conclusion. Their clients were making decisions in real time. A clearance suspended in March is a client lost in April, and a client lost in April does not come back in May because a judge issued a favorable opinion. The temporal mismatch between how fast the market moves and how slow litigation moves was the lever that made the deals rational for the firms that took them. That mismatch was not an accident of the orders. It was the point.
Where this leaves the idea of an independent bar
Here is where I stop keeping my opinions on a leash.
The four firms that litigated proved the orders were illegal. That is not a close call anymore. Four federal judges, appointed across administrations of both parties, looked at these orders and found them unconstitutional on grounds a law student could recite. The legal question is settled. Which means the firms that paid did not pay because the law was unclear. They paid because the law being on their side was not enough to make them safe, and they knew it.
That is the fact the profession has to sit with. Being right in court did not protect Perkins Coie’s business in the months it took to win. The permanent injunctions arrived, but the fear had already done its work, and every firm that cut a deal did so with full knowledge that a court would probably have vindicated a fight. They calculated that vindication was too slow and too expensive to be worth the risk to their partners’ distributions. That is a rational calculation. It is also a confession.
Because a bar that will defend an unpopular client only when defending is cheap is not an independent bar. It is a service industry with good branding. The entire justification for the protections lawyers enjoy, the whole reason society tolerates advocates who take the side of the guilty, the hated, the losing, is that someone has to be willing to stand between state power and the individual when it costs something. The firms that folded in 2025 told their clients, their associates, and themselves that they would perform that role right up until it got expensive, and then they would write a check to the very power they were supposed to check.
I do not say this from a comfortable perch, and I try to be fair to Brad Karp’s arithmetic. He was managing a partnership, not a monastery. Partners can leave. Clients can walk. A leader who watches his firm dissolve out of principle has arguably failed the people who depend on him. The deal-makers were not cowards in any cartoon sense. They were stewards making a defensible business decision under duress.
But defensible is a low bar for a profession that likes to talk about itself in the language of duty. The firms that fought were also managing partnerships, also had associates and clients and payrolls, also faced the same market that Karp described, and they fought anyway, and they won. Their existence is the rebuttal to every argument that surrender was the only responsible choice. Susman Godfrey did not evaporate. Jenner did not collapse. WilmerHale is still WilmerHale. The catastrophe the deal-makers invoked to justify their deals did not befall the firms that refused the deals.
What lingers is a hierarchy nobody voted for. There are now firms that demonstrated they will stand in the fire, and firms that demonstrated they will pay to stay out of it, and every general counsel in America saw which was which. The next time a client needs a firm that will take a case the government hates, that client has a shorter list than it used to, and it knows exactly whose names belong on it.
The orders are enjoined. The clearances are restored. The contracts are safe. On the surface the profession absorbed the blow and moved on. Underneath, something changed that no injunction reaches. A price was discovered. Nine firms told the market what their independence cost, and the number turned out to be a fraction of one good year’s profits. That number is on the record now. It cannot be unlearned. And the firms that never named a price are the only ones who still get to claim they were never for sale.