Four months have passed since President Donald Trump began a pressure campaign to punish law firms that worked for clients who opposed him and his administration’s allies. As the dust settles, the resulting deals Trump made with major law firms appear to be having their desired effect.
Vulnerable litigants in politically sensitive areas, like immigration, are struggling to find pro bono legal support—particularly from firms among the highest-grossing and most profitable in the country. And at many of those same firms, diversity efforts—long believed essential to increasing the number minority and women partners—are being scaled back, abandoned, or hidden from public view.
As one pro bono leader recently said, the decline in support comes just when it is needed most, Law.com reported.
Law firms are holding back, even as the administration routinely takes actions that traditionally would have triggered a wave of litigation. “Those two things are coming together to create a much bigger gap than we’ve had before,” the pro bono leader said.
Major Firms Pull Back
How deep are the problems? The administration’s crackdown on firms “is undermining legal defenses for the vulnerable,” Reuters reported in its recent broad investigation.
Based upon its interviews with dozens of lawyers and legal nonprofit leaders, reviews of major law firm websites, and analysis of millions of court records, Reuters reported that “dozens of major law firms, wary of political retaliation, have scaled back pro bono work, diversity initiatives and litigation that could place them in conflict with the Trump administration.”
Forty-six of the American Lawyer’s 50 highest-grossing firms have “have removed or altered website references to diversity, equity, and inclusion." In addition, 17 eliminated mentions of immigration and racial justice from the pro bono descriptions on their sites, and three added information about their support of Trump-backed pro bono causes.
The number of Big Law firms involved in cases challenging Trump administration policies has cratered. Just 3% of suits filed under the Administrative Procedure Act since Trump returned to the White House have been handled by AmLaw 50 firms. In Trump’s first term, “those same firms were involved in almost 9%” of the cases.
“Many firms are making a strategic calculation: withdraw from pro bono work frowned on by Trump, or risk becoming the next target,” Reuters said.
Blacklisting Big Law
Beginning in February, President Trump issued a series of executive orders blacklisting several large firms that had worked for clients who had opposed him and or his allies. The orders suspended lawyers’ security clearances, blocked access to government buildings, prevented government hiring of firm employees, and required federal agencies to terminate contracts with firms.
Not only did the orders cut off firms’ access to the federal government, they also threatened clients with penalties if they were found to have hired targeted law firms to advise them on federal contracts.
At the same time, Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sent letters to several AmLaw 100 firms requesting information about their employment practices around diversity, equity, and inclusion in order to determine whether the firms “discriminated against white or male employees, applicants, and training program participants,” the agency said.
Nine of the nation’s largest firms—fearing financial disaster as a result of the executive orders and EEOC letters—struck deals with Trump to end or dramatically revise DEI initiatives, hire lawyers from across the political spectrum, and offer financial concessions to fund pro-administration legal causes.
Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, and Milbank pledged to spend $100 million on pro bono causes that the administration supports. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison agreed to $40 million. And Kirkland & Ellis, Allen Overy Shearman & Sterling, Latham & Watkins, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett promised $125 million each. Taken together, the firms committed $940 million to Trump-backed pro bono efforts.
Vague Commitments
Trump has said the law firms’ commitments will “help end the weaponization of the justice system and the legal profession.” The nine firms have acknowledged they feared the orders would harm their businesses and their clients.
Nonetheless, four firms— Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey—won permanent injunctions against the administration and provided a courthouse blueprint for other firms that may be targeted. And in the months that have followed, the nine firms that capitulated to Trump have been criticized for failing to stand up to the administration, and have lost a handful of corporate clients and partners as a result.
It remains an open question what would have happened had the nine firms fought back. It’s also unclear what will happen with the pro bono commitments they made to the administration. The agreements said the firms would focus on pro bono work for veterans, public servants, fighting antisemitism, and ensuring fairness in the justice system. Trump, however, has taken a broader view, suggesting he may use the firms to assist the coal industry with leasing on public lands and to help him defend his tariff proposals.
Walking Away With a Win
For their part, the nine firms appear to wish the issue would simply go away. None of the nine firms will discuss any work they have done that would satisfy their financial commitments to the administration, The American Lawyer reported.
Legal ethics professors who spoke to American Lawyer believe the firms do not want to do pro bono work for the president, nor do they want to be seen as capitulating to additional demand. On the other hand, Trump’s deals appeared to give the administration a win against a perceived enemy, elite law firms, that it does not want to jeopardize by getting into a protracted court battle with them.
“Neither side has an interest here in pushing things too far because the Trump administration has kind of walked away with a win here regardless of what the courts do,” New York Law School ethics professor Rebecca Roiphe told The American Lawyer.
Whatever the firms do, the deals continue to have an industry-wide chilling effect on pro bono services. That’s particularly true in areas such as defending reproductive rights, LGBTQ-related issues, voting access, and immigration, according to a May report by CNN,
More than a dozen law firm partners, pro bono program directors and legal aid group leaders told CNN that lawyers “now may think twice before pitching cases that would step too far into politics.” A worry has set in “that types of pro bono legal work, where hundreds of lawyers from large firms mobilize in humanitarian crises, may no longer be politically viable.” CNN reported.
Legal Aid Cutbacks
Legal aid organizations may be unwilling—or unable—to fill the gap left by Big Law. Even as the administration has attacked major law firms, the future of the largest backer of civil legal aid in the country—the federally funded Legal Services Corp. (LSC)—remains in doubt.
At present, the U.S. House of Representatives is considering cutting LSC funding by nearly half, from $560 million to $300 million next year. If approved, the LSC’s budget would decline to a level on par with its funding in 1999. This is an improvement, however, on the White House’s budget proposal. The Trump administration called for eliminating the LSC altogether, and included just $21 million in its budget proposal to wind down the corporation’s operations.
The LSC provides grants to more than 130 legal aid providers with 900 offices across the country. Even at its current funding level, the organizations that LSC supports are forced to turn away or provide only partial help to millions of potential clients, the agency said. To fully fund its work, the LSC’s board of directors requested an appropriation of $2.13 billion.
While a 4x increase in federal support appears highly unlikely, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee on July 17 voted to increase the LSC’s current budget by $6 million—a signal that deep LSC cuts are not a foregone conclusion. And the LSC has enlisted help from bipartisan groups of corporate leaders, state attorneys general, and state chief justices, as well as members of the U.S. House and Senate to drum up support for the corporation.
Some 160 law firms have also signed a letter urging Congress to continue to maintain and restore the LSC’s budget “to the amount necessary to serve our communities.” Among the signatories are seven of the nine law firms that cut deals with the Trump administration.
“Legal assistance helps veterans access their benefits. It helps survivors of domestic violence leave unsafe situations. It helps displaced hurricane and wildfire victims attain the documents they need to rebuild,” one of the LSC’s high-profile supporters, the author John Grisham, wrote in an op-ed for USA Today. “These are not political issues—these are problems that can affect anyone.”
Is DEI DOA?
The deals Trump struck helped the nine law firms stave off an EEOC probe into their diversity programs and hiring practices, Reuters reported.
In an earlier executive order, Trump had said the agency should determine whether elite law firms “reserve certain positions, such as summer associate spots, for individuals of preferred races; promote individuals on a discriminatory basis; permit client access on a discriminatory basis; or provide access to events, trainings, or travel on a discriminatory basis.” The EEOC’s acting chair, Andrea Lucas, quickly followed up with a letter to 20 AmLaw 100 firms requesting information about their DEI-related employment practices. And after Trump struck deals with the nine firms, the EEOC trumpeted a series of “settlement agreements” with several of the firms that it had targeted.
Law firms spent years creating and nurturing DEI programs. But in the wake of Trump’s and the EEOC’s actions, those efforts were altered, discarded, or driven underground within a matter of weeks.
Within days of signing its agreement with Trump in March, Skadden canceled all future events for the firm’s employee affinity groups and had removed mentions of those groups from its website, Bloomberg News noted. Previously, the firm supported at least 10 affinity networks “for parents, veterans, Asian-Pacific Islanders, Blacks, and Latinos, among others,” Bloomberg said.
Meanwhile, the upper echelons at the largest law firms in the legal profession remain overwhelmingly white and male. In its most recent survey of diversity at AmLaw 200 firms, 86% of partners were white, and 73% were men. In the previous year, the number of minority partners had increased just .6%, and while just over 50% of associates were women, the talent pipeline sprang “significant leaks” when it came to promoting women to partner, the survey said.
In spite of this, “nearly all of the nation’s 50 top-grossing law firms have removed or revised online references to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Reuters said in its report. “Between February and early March, 35 of the 50 highest-earning firms highlighted DEI efforts. By late June, only two had not altered that language.”
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David L. Brownis a legal affairs writer and consultant, who has served as head of editorial at ALM Media, editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal and Legal Times, and executive editor of The American Lawyer. He consults on thought leadership strategy, creates in-depth content for legal industry clients, and works closely with Best Law Firms, as senior content consultant.
