Whenever I tweet my anger at the deals large corporate law firms are making with Donald Trump, I get some variation of this response: “Did you really expect Big Law to have principles?”

It’s a good question. By any measure, the massive, powerful law firms that collectively make up what lawyers and law students call “Big Law” are not moral organizations. 

Paul Weiss, the first firm to capitulate to Trump, has represented a who’s-who of the companies making the world a worse place — Chevron, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blackstone — and a hodgepodge of hedge funds. Pick out any Big Law firm, whichever political party to which it has pledged fealty, and you’ll find a rogues’ gallery of awful clients and destructive litigation. Little villainy can be accomplished without competent lawyering.

I wasn’t sure, really, why the capitulation in the face of these firms, falling like dominoes right in a row, filled me with such rage. I’m, somewhat bizarrely, a lawyer myself, so at first, I thought it was like how a doctor might feel after reading about Mengele. Professional disappointment and the like. But I don’t identify primarily as a lawyer or care much about law as a profession, so it probably wasn’t that. There have been fascist lawyers before — even gay fascist lawyers, ticking off a second one of my identitarian boxes — and they never made me feel the level of rage I feel at Paul Weiss, Cadwalader, Latham & Watkins, and all the other firms bowing down to Trump.

After a few days sitting with this, I realized something. The Democrats, too, long ago ceased to disappoint me. I’ve been disabused of any notions of the Democratic Party’s effectiveness or adherence to principle for years. Yet I still find myself perceptibly angered at their behavior under Trump, their flailing and triangulating and capitulating. What’s going on here?

Perceiving my common reaction to the Democrats and Big Law opened my eyes. No, it’s not that I thought highly of either of these institutions. It’s that both of them, under Trump, abandoned the one last thing that was supposed to make them different: that, on some level, they were going to be a counterweight to fascism. Both had profited greatly from this tacit understanding. And it was all a lie, or more accurately, it was all branding. In the highest firmaments of society, there really is only bad, a big dark cloud of menace of which Trump is one molecule and anyone else with real power is another.

Paul Weiss has a long history of association with the Democrats. Former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch is a partner there, as is Chuck Schumer’s brother. Paul Weiss leadership went all out for Kamala Harris, and another partner there helped Harris in her Trump debate prep. Paul Weiss represented Edith Windsor in her successful litigation against the Defense of Marriage Act, paving the way for same-sex marriage nationwide.

Stuff like this doesn’t matter to you or me. But it matters to the law students who, every summer and fall, line up for on-campus interviews (colloquially, “OCI”), the process by which Big Law determines its summer associates and thus, its next class of attorneys. Those students — who have made it into and succeeded at the nation’s top law schools — will leave OCI with a handful of offers. Their own personal politics will play into which offer they accept. A gay law student, a Democrat, a law student who may feel queasy about eventually helping Exxon Mobil extract more oil from the ground — they are all more likely to choose a firm that has a reputation for, well, successfully laundering their reputation. Paul Weiss represented Edie Windsor … How bad could the law firm really be?

The sad truth of Big Law — that it embraces a skin-deep version of liberalism easily tossed aside when profits are threatened — is the same sad truth of the Democratic Party. These are institutions that, at base, are primarily concerned with their own preservation. There are no larger principles here. There is a public image of inclusivity and pluralism fed to the masses, but when that public image becomes problematic, it is quickly discarded.

The Big Law firms that have cut deals with Trump are now rushing to cancel any DEI-adjacent programs they had in place. In one particularly cynical example, the law firm Skadden Arps — which agreed to provide $100 million worth of free legal services to Trump-supported causes and to create fellowships for law students to work on Trump-supported issues — has canceled its “affinity groups,” where lawyers of similar backgrounds (parents, Latinos, Black lawyers, etc.) could congregate and hold events. So much for pluralism.

As for the Democrats, they have rushed to throw trans people overboard, with the new governing ethos of the party being some variant of “act more like Trump.” Democratic leadership has gone silent after enduring weeks of intense criticism for failing to stand up to Trump, including Chuck Schumer’s shocking decision to support the Trump/MAGA budget. In the face of Trump’s onslaught, Big Law and the Democrats have reacted the same way: with cowardice and appeasement instead of confrontation and bravery.

Yes, it’s naive to think that something like “principles” exist for a law firm that makes billions of dollars a year. But that’s what we were asked to believe, and a lot of people bought it. It was never a secret that these firms made their money by destroying the world. But the deal we were tacitly promised was that if the shit hit the fan and the fascists came for us, these firms would bravely stand against them. That has proven to be a lie.

I think that ultimately, we are seeing the failure of liberalism in the classic sense. Liberalism is less an ideology and more a shallow philosophical embrace of free markets and institutions. There’s no moral center, nothing to cling to when the going gets tough. Without strong principles, you are kneeling in kente cloth one day and asking for more police funding the next — you are boasting about your reputation for diversity and then canceling your diversity fellowships. Big Law and Democrat liberals would rather preserve institutions than disrupt the onset of fascism. Say what you will about the far-right or the left, but they understand power dynamics and realize the tremendous stakes here.

Donald Trump is a stress test for institutions. Like a new roof in a pounding rainstorm, we’re learning what holds up. Big Law has largely failed the test, and the Democrats are in the process of failing. If anything good comes of the Trump Administration, it will be that as the president lays waste to so much, he will also destroy the carefully crafted veneers of these ultimately hollow actors.

John Teufel is an attorney and columnist with The Indy. He is on Twitter at @JohnTeufelNYC.

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