What Biglaw Is Saying About The Unrest Sweeping The Nation

Dear Members of the Paul, Weiss Community:

The COVID-19 pandemic as well as the recent atrocities in Minneapolis and protests across the nation are creating urgent, new needs, while imposing enormous financial pressure on nonprofits working to meet those needs. The nonprofits require vastly greater resources to meet our society’s unprecedented needs.

To address this issue, we have made very significant contributions throughout the pandemic to New York City hospitals and New York City healthcare workers to help those most directly devastated by the coronavirus crisis, in addition to creating the Coronavirus Relief Center. Following the events of the past week in Minneapolis and nationwide, the firm has decided to make very significant contributions to organizations dedicated to fighting for racial justice, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Equal Justice Initiative.

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We have also decided, in an effort to provide even greater support to vital nonprofits, to increase the firm’s matching employee donations for 2020 from a maximum of $1,000 to $1,500 for eligible organizations.

Eligible organizations are those recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as Section 501(c)(3) charitable organizations, to which contributions are tax deductible.

Ineligible organizations include, but are not limited to:

· Political organizations.

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· Organizations primarily promoting religious purposes or that require participants to be of a certain faith to participate in programs or receive services.

· Donor-advised funds, private foundations or personal trusts.

· Organizations that do not comply with the Firm’s non-discrimination policy (i.e., organizations that discriminate on the basis of a person’s race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status or other characteristic protected by law).

For non-US employees, an international equivalency determination will be used.

Donations should be made through our Benevity portal (direct link below) https://paulweiss.benevity.org/pingone/redir. The link is also available in Lotus Notes, All Apps. Please note that you must be on the internal Paul Weiss network to access Benevity (VPN and Citrix is also supported).

If you have any questions regarding the program, please email the Information Center, [email protected].

Brad

Brad S. Karp | Chairman
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP
1285 Avenue of the Americas | New York, NY 10019-6064
+1 212 373 3316 (Direct Phone) | +1 212 492 0316 (Direct Fax)
[email protected] | www.paulweiss.com
Pronouns: He/Him/His

Dear Members of the Paul, Weiss Community,

So much has happened over the past three days across our nation to deepen our unimaginably raw wounds. People and communities of color have been subject for generations to racially discriminatory and abusive policing policies and tactics. Only recently, however, have such policies and tactics been graphically captured on video, which has led to excruciating pain, anguished escalation and visceral demands for justice.

As a law firm, we are focused on moving forward constructively, concretely and expeditiously to help achieve racial justice, combat racially discriminatory policing practices, and eradicate systemic racism. We fully understand that this crisis of racial injustice is too daunting, too sprawling, too embedded and too complex to be addressed by a single law firm or public interest organization or even a group of law firms or public interest organizations, no matter how well-intentioned and well-resourced. Just as we did in connection with the gun violence epidemic, the family separation crisis and the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic, we intend to form strategic partnerships across the private bar and the public interest community to effect meaningful and enduring change.

There are esteemed organizations with which we have worked closely over the years and decades that have been performing extraordinary work in the sphere of racial justice, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Equal Justice Initiative, among many others. In the wake of the current crisis, we have made very significant contributions to these organizations and are in contact with them to hear about how we, and the private bar more generally, can support their efforts in fighting racial injustice. We are developing priorities and strategies, in consultation with these organizations, and reaching out across the bar to organize vast resources.

Through these efforts, we intend to reinforce the message that black lives matter, provide accountability, and incentivize positive policy changes and deter abusive tactics, through hiring, training, discipline and the strategic deployment of the judicial system. We understand the issues and the challenges only too well. Over the past few days, you have seen Loretta Lynch and Jeh Johnson make numerous national media appearances, where they have eloquently and movingly described the challenges that we as a nation, and people and communities of color, face, as well as the solutions that are required if we are to eradicate systemic racism. I am attaching a vitally important 2017 ABA Report issued by the Task Force on Building Public Trust in the American Justice System, which was chaired by Ted Wells. Everyone in our community should read this report. It is chillingly relevant in view of today’s events. The Report begins:

“This report examines a wound in the American criminal justice system that members of the legal profession have a special duty to address. In too many parts of the country, relationships between people of color and law enforcement are broken. Communities have been traumatized by police killings of civilians, often unarmed black men, captured in chilling footage and transmitted across traditional media and the Internet. Anger, suspicion and resentment toward the police have followed, frequently in the same communities that are most in need of professional and responsive policing. And protests have erupted. Many have been peaceful demonstrations, but others have led to violence and civil unrest. In some instances, police with militarized gear, weapons and equipment have clashed with protestors, resulting in injuries to both citizens and officers.”

https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/office_president/2_8_task_force_on_building_trust_in_american_justice_system.authcheckdam.pdf

As I requested in my firm-wide communication last Friday, so many members of our community have shared passionate, innovative and thoughtful action items and ideas about what we as a law firm and a community can do to help achieve racial justice. Your voices have been heard and we urge you to continue to share your ideas. The only way we can hope to remedy these injustices is if we join forces and work together, within our community, across the bar, in partnership with public interest communications, and beyond. This cause is too great and failure at this point in our history is not an option.

Please know that we are in this together and we are in this for the long run and I pledge that we will fight this fight with all of our collective talents and might.

Please be safe.

Brad

From: Karp, Brad S
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2020 4:04 PM
To: GRP-ALL-WW
Subject: George Floyd and the Quest For Racial Justice

Dear Members of the Paul, Weiss Community,

I began Tuesday’s meeting of our Inclusion Task Force by expressing pain, sorrow and outrage at the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department and the racial targeting of Christian Cooper in our own backyard, just as I had expressed pain, sorrow and outrage several weeks earlier during an Associates town hall at the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Too often in recent years I have found myself expressing pain, sorrow and outrage at the senseless and racially motivated murder of persons of color.

Words feel increasingly hollow. My expressions of pain, sorrow and outrage cannot bring back George Floyd. They cannot bring back Ahmaud Arbery, or any of the thousands of other innocents whose lives have been taken solely because of the color of their skin. It is not enough to care. It is time for engagement. It is time for action. It is time for accountability. It is time for justice.

Our law firm has been at the forefront of the fight for racial justice, beginning long before I was born. Nearly a century ago, our partner Walter Pollak successfully persuaded the Supreme Court to vacate the convictions of the “Scottsboro Boys” – four young black men falsely accused of raping a white woman in Alabama and sentenced to death. Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932). Lloyd Garrison, the grandson of the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, joined our firm in 1945 and pressed for racial justice and urged our firm to play a leadership role in the Civil Rights movement. In 1949, we hired Bill Coleman and became the first major law firm in the United States to hire a lawyer of color. As fate would have it, Bill Coleman joined forces with Louis Pollak, the son of Walter Pollak and at the time a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss (who later became the Dean of Yale Law School and a celebrated U.S. federal district judge), and these two Paul, Weiss lawyers worked closely with Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund lawyers in developing the overall strategy for attacking the legality of segregated public education and drafting the briefs in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

We have continued in the decades since to fight for racial justice, in all its forms and manifestations. We successfully challenged voting rights restrictions based on race. We successfully challenged racial discrimination in housing, in education, in criminal sentencing. We helped draft the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act. We participated in peaceful marches from Selma to Montgomery. We chaired the Board of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in its formative years and again quite recently, and we successfully fought the group of Southern Republican Senators who tried to destroy it by revoking its tax-exempt status. We co-chaired the White House Conference on Civil Rights. As Martin Luther King noted, Paul, Weiss has been “in the forefront of the public battle against racial discrimination.”

Fighting for racial justice is at the heart of what we are as an institution; it is what we stand for; it is what we believe in our hearts; it is what attracted so many of us to join this firm. I have spoken to Ted, Jeh and Loretta. I have spoken to the members of the Inclusion Task Force and many others within our community. We stand united in saying that enough is enough. Expressions of pain, sorrow and outrage are not sufficient.

We need accountability; we need change; we need justice. And we need them now. No more lives can be taken without consequences. We must directly confront this national crisis.

We have a unique history of fighting for racial justice; we have a powerful platform; we have the will to effect meaningful change and to root out systemic racism.

I intend to work with Ted, Jeh and Loretta, as well as our Inclusion Task Force and other members of our community, to develop an actionable plan to promote and secure racial justice in our country.

We want to hear your thoughts and suggestions of how we can best achieve what we have fought for over the past century, making the promise of America real for all of our citizens.

Please take care of yourselves and be safe.

Brad

This message is intended only for the use of the Addressee and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please erase all copies of the message and its attachments and notify us immediately.

From: Karp, Brad S
Sent: Wednesday, June 3, 2020 12:11 AM
To: GRP-ALL-WW
Subject: Town Hall — Thursday, June 4th, at 9:30 am

Dear Members of the Paul, Weiss Community,

Ted Wells, Jeh Johnson, Loretta Lynch and I will lead a town hall on Thursday morning at 9:30 am to discuss the tragic murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, how this event and the nationwide protests that have followed have profoundly affected all members of the Paul, Weiss family, the need for everyone in our community to communicate openly, be treated with dignity and respect, and be supportive of each other, and, finally, how we, as a firm and a family, intend to move forward constructively and decisively.

This is an extraordinarily important discussion and I urge each of you to attend. Call-in details will be provided tomorrow.

Please be safe and please take care of yourself and your loved ones.

Brad

From: Karp, Brad S
Sent: Wednesday, June 3, 2020 4:14 PM
To: GRP-ALL-WW <[email protected]>
Subject: Pauli Murray and the Quest for Racial Justice

Dear Members of the Paul, Weiss Community:

I apologize for the series of communications in the wake of the horrific events in Minneapolis and the follow-on protests across the nation, but I believe it is vitally important to (over)communicate at a time like this and to take advantage of every opportunity to reinforce our shared culture and our firm’s magnificent history in terms of pressing for racial justice.

One of my partners just sent me the note, pasted below, from Peter Salovey, the President of Yale University, expressing his profound grief at the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police department. In his note to the Yale community, President Salovey references only one individual besides George Floyd – a civil rights lawyer (and so much more), named Pauli Murray. President Salovey writes: “I have been thinking much of the life of the extraordinary Pauli Murray, a lawyer, civil rights leader, and Yale Law School graduate. She experienced firsthand the cruelties of racial segregation and suffered injustices. She knew fear. However, she wrote in her memoir, ‘Seeing the relationship between my personal cause and the universal cause of freedom released me from a sense of isolation…I would be no less afraid to challenge the system of racial segregation, but the heightened significance of my cause would impel me to act in spite of my fears.’”

President Salovey goes on at great length to comfort the Yale community by describing Pauli Murray’s wisdom and courage: “I have implored myself—and earnestly invite you to do the same— to make direct use of Pauli Murray’s wisdom. Her words remind us of all that we have been able to accomplish together because of our shared commitment to the common good….It is vital to remember that we have been united in easing suffering, improving lives, and providing hope during a turbulent and challenging period of our history. If we can do this, we are capable, all of us, of creating the America we must insist belongs to us all. In 1945, Pauli Murray wrote, “As an American I inherit the magnificent tradition of an endless march toward freedom and toward the dignity of all mankind.” We have so much more to do to foster and sustain an equitable society. Instead of feeling the isolating effects of fear when our sense of community is shaken, we must remember that we are connected in more ways than we are divided. And that where we are divided, we must work, now, in the interest of unity and justice. This is a matter of the highest importance. So, let us act as Pauli Murray would have us act toward those we know well but also those to whom we are connected simply by a common and powerful dream.”

Most of you unfamiliar with our firm’s history do not know that Pauli Murray was a Paul, Weiss litigation associate for four years, from 1956 through 1960, the first African-American female lawyer ever hired by a major NYC law firm. The story of Ms. Murray’s hiring by Paul, Weiss, the impact Ms. Murray had on the civil rights movement both before and after her employment at Paul, Weiss (where she met Ruth Bader Ginsburg), and the impact Paul, Weiss had on Ms. Murray are chronicled below – all part of our firm’s extraordinary history and our significant role in the civil rights movement and the fight for racial justice.

“In 1956, Pauli Murray received a call from Lloyd Garrison inviting her to join Paul, Weiss’s Litigation Department. Ms. Murray described Mr. Garrison’s offer as “startling news.” As an African-American woman, she had faced many challenges in pursuing a legal career. Her tenure at Howard Law School – where she graduated first in her class as the only woman – was punctuated with protest and demonstrations. Her activism would bring her to the attention of President Franklin Roosevelt; Ms. Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt would maintain a lifelong friendship. But even the President’s personal recommendation could not gain Ms. Murray access to graduate programs unwilling to admit women to their ranks.

In her autobiography, Ms. Murray remembered the “amazing good fortune” of Paul, Weiss’s offer, recalling, “The professional opportunity that had eluded me in the past opened so unexpectedly that I felt like a sandlot player catapulted overnight into Major League Baseball.” As a member of the firm’s Litigation Department, she was struck by the intensity of the work and “the magnitude of the firm’s operations.” She would recall the experience as “decisive for my future growth,” writing, “When I left the firm after four years, I carried with me the assurance of having been tested by the most exacting standards of the legal profession, an experience that enabled me to face new challenges with greater self-confidence.”

Ms. Murray would later write to Judge Rifkind to express gratitude for her transformative time at the firm, in a letter preserved in the firm’s archive:

Throughout her career, Ms. Murray honed extraordinary talents as an activist, lawyer, author and minister. As early as 1938, she sought to integrate the all-white University of North Carolina, an effort that won the backing of the NAACP and garnered national publicity. Ms. Murray’s nearly 750-page-long book on segregation, entitled States’ Laws on Race and Color, was widely disseminated by the A.C.L.U upon its publication in 1950. Thurgood Marshall referred to it as “the bible” that lay behind his arguments in the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Ms. Murray’s early legal writing on gender discrimination – including a speculative plan for rendering sex discrimination unconstitutional under the 14^th Amendment – so influenced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who she met at Paul, Weiss, that the future Supreme Court justice named Ms. Murray co-author of her first brief to the Supreme Court. In that landmark case of Reed v. Reed, the Court ruled that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits differential treatment based on sex. Ms. Murray would go on to work with Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, and in 1977, at age 62, Murray became the first African-American woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest.”

I marvel at the extraordinary history of our firm and the influence we have had in advancing the civil rights movement from its very beginning.

Recent events remind us that we have urgent work that we must do to achieve racial justice in our country and to fulfill the legacy created by Bill Coleman, Pauli Murray, Lloyd Garrison, Walter Pollak, Louis Pollak, Morris Abram, Ted Sorensen, Bill DeWind, Leon Higginbotham, Simon Rifkind, Arthur Liman and so many of the giants who have graced our firm over the past century.

Ted, Jeh, Loretta carry that mantle today — and we look forward to speaking with you at tomorrow morning’s town hall.

Please take good care of yourself.

Brad

Dear Members of the Yale Community,

I write to you today deeply upset by the killing of George Floyd while he was in the custody of Minneapolis police officers. Mr. Floyd’s death follows a pattern of racial injustice that has become too familiar in our country and that amounts to a national emergency.

At a time when the American community must come together more than ever before, George Floyd’s horrifying death shocks our shared conscience and indicts our shared failure. It can and must remind us of other similar killings and of the racism, nativism, and bigotry too pervasive in society today and throughout our country’s history.

Over the past week, I have been thinking about two seemingly incongruous things—our sense of community and one of our most basic emotions: fear.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, legitimate fear has been very much with us, but not just about the virus itself, and not among us equally. From reports of racism against people of Asian descent to the unacceptable disparities in health outcomes and health care, there was every reason for us to fear for the safety of our neighbors and family members, and of some, sadly, more than of others.

At the same time, I saw nurses, doctors, support staff, and volunteers act with courage, selflessness, and compassion in our home city and around the world. We nurtured a growing sense of community, which gave us the optimism and hope that must ever be a cornerstone of our beloved country. It is in the face of that noble expression of solidarity that George Floyd’s death has shaken us and the shared spirit of heroism we have aroused to fight the pandemic.

As I read the news reports of Mr. Floyd’s death and its explosive response, I know that many members of our community feel fear in their daily lives because of the injustices they have experienced and witnessed, and I thought of how fear so reliably leads to anxiety, depression, health deterioration, and anger, and also to aggression and even violence. Some of the protests have turned destructive, undermining the plea for justice all Americans must share. Fear is powerful, damaging, and unpredictable in its effects.

I believe that all of us at Yale must do what we can to replace fear with hope—and not with anything less than action. Here I have been thinking much of the life of the extraordinary Pauli Murray, a lawyer, civil rights leader, and Yale Law School graduate. She experienced firsthand the cruelties of racial segregation and suffered injustices. She knew fear. However, she wrote in her memoir, “Seeing the relationship between my personal cause and the universal cause of freedom released me from a sense of isolation…I would be no less afraid to challenge the system of racial segregation, but the heightened significance of my cause would impel me to act in spite of my fears.”

I have implored myself—and earnestly invite you to do the same— to make direct use of Pauli Murray’s wisdom. Her words remind us of all that we have been able to accomplish together because of our shared commitment to the common good. Since mid-March, we have saved lives in this pandemic. We have isolated ourselves, changed the way we live, and sacrificed to safeguard the well-being of the most vulnerable among us and prevent our hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. It is vital to remember that we have been united in easing suffering, improving lives, and providing hope during a turbulent and challenging period of our history. If we can do this, we are capable, all of us, of creating the America we must insist belongs to us all.

In 1945, Pauli Murray wrote, “As an American I inherit the magnificent tradition of an endless march toward freedom and toward the dignity of all mankind.” We have so much more to do to foster and sustain an equitable society. Instead of feeling the isolating effects of fear when our sense of community is shaken, we must remember that we are connected in more ways than we are divided. And that where we are divided, we must work, now, in the interest of unity and justice. This is a matter of the highest importance.

So, let us act as Pauli Murray would have us act toward those we know well but also those to whom we are connected simply by a common and powerful dream. I am grateful that you and I share Yale and its mission to improve the world today and for future generations. In looking forward to the work we have ahead of us, I wish you peace and strength.

With best wishes for your health and safety,

Peter Salovey
President

Brad S. Karp | Chairman
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP
1285 Avenue of the Americas | New York, NY 10019-6064
+1 212 373 3316 (Direct Phone) | +1 212 492 0316 (Direct Fax)
[email protected] | www.paulweiss.com
Pronouns: He/Him/His