Overview

Campaign Against Major Law Firms

The Orders and Their Targets

On March 6, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order titled "Addressing Risks From Perkins Coie LLP," citing the firm's representation of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign as well as its hiring of a company Trump accused of producing a fabricated dossier. The order immediately suspended security clearances for firm personnel and directed federal agencies to dissolve all existing contracts with the firm. Within weeks, similar orders followed. Trump issued "Addressing Risks from Jenner and Block" on March 25, 2025, and "Addressing Risks from WilmerHale" on March 27, 2025. The administration also targeted Covington and Burling, Susman Godfrey, and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison.

The orders claimed that the targeted firms employed lawyers who had worked on prosecutions and investigations that targeted Trump, and that they operated what the administration characterized as illegal diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Susman Godfrey, for instance, was accused in an April 9, 2025, executive order of spearheading "efforts to weaponize the American legal system and degrade the quality of American elections." The order against Paul Weiss cited the firm's past involvement in litigation related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot and its prior association with Mark Pomerantz, an attorney who had investigated Trump for the Manhattan district attorney's office.

The Settlement Track

In exchange for lifting its order, the administration secured from Paul Weiss a pledge to provide $40 million in free legal work to support White House-favored initiatives. That deal set a template. Fearing similar orders, eight other firms moved swiftly to make preemptive deals with the administration, promising nearly $1 billion total in free legal work. The settling firms also agreed to retool or eliminate diversity initiatives and to hire lawyers from across the political spectrum. The settlements led to an exodus of multiple high-profile attorneys at several of the firms, who said the agreements amounted to capitulation in response to an unlawful intimidation campaign.

Significance and Impact

By chilling lawyers from engaging in zealous advocacy on behalf of clients adverse to the Trump administration, the executive orders not only threatened the protected speech and petitioning of private parties but also risked depriving courts of the expert counsel necessary, in an adversarial legal system, for full and fair adjudication of pressing constitutional questions. Legal scholars and bar groups identified the campaign as a structural threat to the independence of the bar, not merely a dispute between the White House and individual firms.

The American College of Trial Lawyers stated that the cumulative effect of the orders was intended to create an atmosphere of intimidation within the legal community. Critics described the orders as a form of coercion meant not only to threaten the named firms but also to intimidate other firms considering representation of clients or matters seen by the president as adverse to his interests. The concern was not merely hypothetical: several firms reported clients quietly distancing themselves in the wake of the orders, and some law students and lateral candidates reconsidered offers at firms that had settled.

Amicus briefs from the Knight First Amendment Institute, the ACLU, and others argued that the executive orders violated the First Amendment as retaliation against constitutionally protected legal advocacy, and separately violated the separation of powers by suppressing the ability of lawyers to file the legal challenges that courts rely on to perform their constitutional function. The implication extended well beyond the targeted firms: any administration — of any party — could, if the orders had been upheld, deploy similar measures against law firms representing disfavored causes.

Reactions and Debate

Four law firms chose to fight back in court. The first permanent ruling came on May 2, 2025, when U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell blocked the Perkins Coie order, writing that no American president had ever before issued executive orders targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all executive branch agencies. Jenner and Block and WilmerHale also sued and, in late May 2025, both won permanent injunctions from separate federal judges ruling their respective orders unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge John D. Bates found that the order targeting Jenner and Block was "an unconstitutional act of retaliation," noting the absence of legitimate national security justification for stripping the firm's security clearances.

The court ruling against the WilmerHale order found it to be a retaliatory measure violating the firm's First and Fifth Amendment rights, specifically because the order aimed to suspend security clearances, sever government contracts, and restrict federal engagement based on the firm's past representations in politically sensitive cases. In the Perkins Coie case, the district court found the order violated not just the First Amendment but also constitutional provisions guaranteeing the right to counsel and the separation of powers.

The firms that settled fared differently in public perception. Firms that struck deals with the White House, and most prominently Paul Weiss, faced backlash from the public, law students, and their own partners. Critics warned that such concessions could embolden the administration to continue leveraging executive orders as a means of coercing legal compliance through political and economic pressure. The debate within the profession over whether to fight or settle hardened into a lasting reputational divide.

Outlook

On March 3, 2026, the Justice Department filed to drop its appeals of the four district court rulings — then reversed course hours later in a dramatic about-face that left the legal industry stunned. The Justice Department subsequently confirmed it would continue its legal fight to reinstate the executive orders, marking an abrupt reversal after initially signaling it would abandon the appeals. As of mid-2026, the four cases involving Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner and Block, and Susman Godfrey remain pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and the American Bar Association's separate suit against the administration over the orders continues as well.

Congressional Democrats continue investigating the scope and legality of the roughly $1 billion in deal commitments from the nine firms that settled, and at least one firm announced merger plans that raised questions about how much of a Trump deal commitment would transfer to a newly combined entity. The episode has left the legal profession in an uncertain position: the firms that fought have vindicated constitutional principles in district court, but the appellate process is unresolved, and the practical leverage the administration exercised through threatened economic penalties — loss of contracts, security clearances, and federal building access — proved effective against the majority of targeted firms regardless of the courts' ultimate legal conclusions.

As the Cato Institute observed, if allowed to stand, these pressure tactics would have broad and lasting impacts on Americans' ability to retain legal counsel in controversial cases, to sue the government, and to speak their minds — consequences that transcend political ideology. Whether the appellate courts will permanently foreclose such use of executive power, or leave some narrower version of it available to future administrations, is the central unresolved question the episode leaves behind.