Opinion | The most powerful law firms in America do not resist Trump
Covington & Burling, the White-Shoe Washington company, was before being targeted by the president. His offense: having provided pro bono legal work to Jack Smith, who led the federal charge against Mr. Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 elections. On February 25, Mr. Trump issued a Executive order This suspended the security authorizations of the Covington lawyers who had something to do with the representation of Mr. Smith and ordered the federal agencies to end any company with the company. The company has practically nothing to say in response.
Perkins Coie also attracted Mr. Trump’s wrath for representing Hillary Clinton during his 2016 presidential campaign. He tidy A review for any government contracts with the company, while effectively eliminating its lawyers from federal buildings and stripping them with safety authorizations, potentially disabling the penalties for a company whose customers have included important defense contractors such as Boeing, Microsoft and Northrop Groumman. At his credit, Perkins Coie has decided to mount a defense and turned to Quinn Emmanuel, an equally prestigious company based in Los Angeles, to guide it. According to a Times, Quinn Emmanuel report encouraged. (The Williams and Connelly company have taken the case.) Since then, according to what reported, other companies have refused to sign a Amicus brief on behalf of Perkins Coie.
More amazing than everyone, Paul, Weiss, one of the most venerable companies in the world, elected last week to conclude an agreement with Mr. Trump, agreeing, among other things, to contribute to tens of millions of dollars of pro bono services to some of the President’s favorite causes. The company’s chair later explained He did it because the customers were frightened and other companies – rather than gathering in Paul, Weiss’ defense – they started “aggressively soliciting our customers and recruiting our lawyers”.
The choice of these companies to welcome the attacks of Mr. Trump, through action or silence, is deeply wrong. The system of the show is weakened on which all Americans depend: a system in which the rules are known publicly and fixed in advance, not subject to the whims of the arbitrary vendettas. The American slide from a constitutional democracy system, in which the executive power is bound by multiple independent institutions, to a Fiat regime similar to those authoritarian governments that our country has long against, will accelerate the same.
The choice is also misleading as a corporate strategy, compromising the ethics of lawyers, who can expose them to the discipline by the associations and courts of the lawyers, and giving customers wide reasons to doubt that companies will act without fluidity in their defense. Above all, it is useless, as it will do nothing to protect companies from governance based on the extortion that we now seem to face for at least the next four years.
