Biglaw Firms That Cut Deals With Trump Are AWOL As Midterm Election Fights Heat Up

When the nine Biglaw firms that bent the knee to Donald Trump pledged $940 million in pro bono payola for Trump-approved projects, the big question was what all that free legal work would actually buy. A year and a half later, on the eve of the midterms, new reporting from the New York Times has an answer: it buys absence.

According to the Times, few of the nine firms are publicly involved in any of the major legal efforts to check the administration’s attempts to meddle in the election. That’s the same administration that has already started filing litigation designed to sow confusion about the results.

The poster child is, OF COURSE, Paul, Weiss. For the better part of a decade, Norm Eisen, the former White House ethics czar who now leads the Democracy Defenders Fund, had a standard first move whenever he wanted to take on Trump. As the Times tells it:

Whenever Norm Eisen, a leader of the legal resistance against President Trump, wanted to try to hold Mr. Trump accountable over the last decade, one of his first calls was to Brad Karp, the chairman of the white shoe law firm Paul Weiss.

Without hesitation, Mr. Karp would give Mr. Eisen free legal counsel on how to best oppose Mr. Trump, and would then deploy the firm’s vast legal muscle — at no cost — to help.

“He was one of the greatest champions of voting and civil rights — and for democracy — in the country, and to have someone like that advising you, resourcing you and fighting for you was indispensable,” Mr. Eisen said.

The firm didn’t just stop doing the work. It deleted the evidence that it ever did. Paul, Weiss used to trumpet its role in a landmark 1965 voting rights case, and its website featured dozens of articles and press releases about its Trump-era election law work, including a dedicated pro bono page promising the firm would “remain steadfast in our commitment.” Sometime after the firm groveled its way out from under its executive order in March 2025, that page came down, along with 30 others on the subject. Search the site for “voting” today and you get two results.

Steadfast!

If the website scrub sounds familiar, that’s because the firm has done it before. Back when Elon Musk was musing about “anti-democratic” law firms, Paul, Weiss quietly wiped references to its family-reunification and LGBTQ work too. And this is a firm that gave more money to Democrats in 2024 than any other firm.

The damage isn’t limited to Paul, Weiss. At one of the deal firms, several lawyers are volunteering on voting rights causes on the down-low and hoping firm leadership doesn’t find out, according to a lawyer there who spoke to the Times anonymously. And the chill has spread well beyond the nine. Several top 100 firms that never cut a deal are steering clear of politically sensitive cases because they’re afraid of being next.

None of this should come as a shock. We’ve been writing about the chilling effect the Trump deals had on pro bono work — civil rights, voting rights, immigration, reproductive freedom — before the ink on the agreements was dry. The Times puts the logic bluntly: in Trump’s first term, opposing the administration cost firms nothing, financially or politically, and now they see those cases as a threat to profits. That tracks with Karp’s own explanation to Harvard Law students, where he said the partnership unanimously agreed to settle because it feared rival firms would poach its clients and partners.

Eisen, for his part, insists the resistance hasn’t lost a step. He has built a national network of pro-democracy groups, legal nonprofits, public interest firms, and the few big firms that fought their executive orders, like WilmerHale. “We have not seen a single time in the past 20 months in which I did not have the resources,” he said. “The muscle is still there.”

But even Eisen admits, in a poignant turn, he could use the old Paul, Weiss. “I miss Brad,” he said.

Earlier: Paul Weiss Grovels To Trump, Gets Out From Under Executive Order
Did Paul, Weiss Partners Seriously Debate Running The Firm’s Business Past Stephen Miller?
Biglaw’s Trump Deals Have Chilling Effect On Pro Bono
Brad Karp’s Paul, Weiss Reign Ends With An Epstein-File Plot Twist
Brad Karp Takes His Epstein-Stained Resume To Harvard Law
Paul, Weiss’s Multimillion-Dollar Secret Deal To Get Its First Openly Trans Partner Out Of The Firm
Paul Weiss Insists Everything Is Fine, Despite All Evidence That Things Are Not, In Fact, Fine
Skadden Said Its Trump Deal Raised No Ethical Issues. Intel’s Shareholders Disagree.
Biglaw Calls It Pro Bono. Gimme A Break.
Skadden Develops A Hint Of A Backbone, Let’s See How Long It Lasts