Paul, Weiss Loses Two More Litigation Partners. The Firm Would Like You To Know Everything Is Fine.

The slow bleed of litigation talent at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is not slowing down. Two more litigation partners are departing the firm, adding to a string of high-profile exits that has fundamentally reshaped what was once one of Biglaw’s most storied litigation departments.

Andrew Ehrlich, a 24-year veteran of the firm and co-chair of its securities litigation and enforcement group, is departing at the end of the month. A Chambers-ranked securities litigator who represented public companies, boards, and alternative asset managers in high-stakes shareholder and governance litigation, Ehrlich is a genuinely significant loss to the practice group he helped lead. In a statement to Law.com, Ehrlich said:

“After 24 rewarding years at Paul, Weiss, I told firm leadership late last year that it is time for a new chapter. I am enormously proud of and grateful for the challenging work that defined my career at Paul, Weiss and the incredible colleagues with whom I collaborated. While I have not settled on exactly what comes next, my expectation is that it will be in the nonprofit or public sector.”

Ehrlich added that “the Paul, Weiss litigation department is, and will continue to be, the gold standard in client representation,” which is, to be generous, a gracious thing to say on your way out the door.

Also departing is Roberto Gonzalez, who co-chaired the firm’s economic sanctions and anti-money laundering practice. Gonzalez, based in Washington, D.C., is heading to Paul Hastings, where he’ll chair the firm’s sanctions and AML team. His client roster — Amazon, BlackRock, Capital One, Google, JPMorgan, Shopify, Equifax, Tencent — speaks for itself, as does the enthusiasm with which Paul Hastings is receiving him. The firm’s global managing partner Sherrese Smith called his hire “an amazing opportunity,” noting his rare ability to straddle both litigation and corporate advisory work on regulatory matters.

Neither Ehrlich nor Gonzalez has cited the Trump deal as a factor, but context matters, and the context here is impossible to ignore.

This is a litigation department that has been hemorrhaging elite talent since March 2025, when Paul, Weiss became the first Biglaw firm to bend the knee to Donald Trump, trading $40 million in pro bono services and its DEI programs for the rescission of an executive order targeting the firm. The fallout was swift and sustained. Litigation co-chair Karen Dunn, along with partners Bill Isaacson, Jeannie Rhee, and Jessica Phillips, bolted to start their own boutique free from the constraints of the Trump deal. Former SDNY U.S. Attorney Damian Williams departed for Jenner & Block — one of the firms actually fighting the executive orders in court, adding a certain poetic quality to the move. Even more litigation partners followed them out the door in the weeks that followed. Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson retired after four decades at the firm. And Supreme Court litigator Kannon Shanmugam — 39 arguments before the High Court — walked out to Davis Polk. Through all of it, the firm’s official posture was essentially that everything was fine, actually.

And as we reported just recently, that translated to a litigation slowdown that has had consequences for associates, with multiple insiders describing stealth layoffs in the litigation group, dressed up as performance-based decisions. (Stealth layoffs, for those new here, are when firms quietly push associates out during a business downturn by manufacturing performance justifications — reviews that turn suddenly negative despite no prior complaints, uncorroborated by the actual teams the associates worked with. It’s a well-documented Biglaw practice, and Paul, Weiss denied doing it in terms that were pretty much a textbook stealth layoff denial.)

Into all of this steps Jay Cohen, co-head of Paul, Weiss’s litigation department, with a statement that the firm “prioritizes a strong litigation department” and has announced seven new litigation partners this year, plus the launch of a new litigation practice in Houston. To be fair, those aren’t nothing — firms do backfill, and a Houston expansion suggests some ambition. But replacing the institutional knowledge, client relationships, and reputational wattage of partners like Ehrlich, Gonzalez, Shanmugam, Dunn, and the rest isn’t going to be easy.

The deeper issue is the Scott Barshay Paul, Weiss makeover. Barshay, an M&A heavyweight who was a vocal internal champion of the Trump deal and is now the first corporate partner to chair the firm, has been steadily reshaping Paul, Weiss into a transactional-first machine. Revenue is up, profits per partner are up, and the M&A engine is humming. But the litigation department is smaller, quieter, and less starry than it was two years ago, and the people still in it are watching partner after partner leave.

Ehrlich’s parting words called the litigation department “the gold standard in client representation.” Cohen’s statement insists the firm is “deeply committed” to litigation’s success. Perhaps. But when you’ve lost the co-chair, the securities litigation co-chair, the SDNY U.S. Attorney, the Supreme Court advocate, and now the sanctions and AML co-chair — within a short timeframe — the gold standard is going to need some serious repolishing.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1