It’s been a little over six months since Donald Trump fired off a retaliatory executive order threatening to shut down Paul Weiss’s ability to do business as a global law firm, which the firm immediately followed with sycophantic groveling. Paul Weiss offered the administration $40 million in free legal services — ostensibly for conservative-friendly charities — but we’ve since learned that they’ve taken on a role papering up work for the Commerce Department in a questionably legal arrangement.
But the firm’s role as the White House’s Groom of the Stool hasn’t sat well with everyone. And while some departed to less compromised shores, others have just hoped we’d all stop talking about it.
Over the weekend, an account explicitly named after Paul Weiss and the other firms who signed onto cowardly deals with the administration to avoid plainly illegal retaliation, engaged with a prominent Paul Weiss partner and got immediately blocked.
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No one should expect a partner to publicly throw the firm under the bus. At least not until they’ve sketched out an escape plan. But just ignoring a critic reply is free! Instead, we’ve got a Streisand Effect — an example of the reaction creating more of a story than the original event. We almost certainly would never have heard about it again if he’d just ignored the hashtag.
But it seems the “Capitulation Firm” branding strikes a nerve over there.
Would be a shame if people kept calling it out on social media…
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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.