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The Assault on Big Law and Lawyers
Not everyone likes lawyers, but society needs us to represent all sides
President Donald Trump has threatened to upend the practice of law and the rule of law forever in a series of executive orders. Unless you’re a lawyer or familiar with “Big Law”, the names on the recent executive orders are likely just that — names. Perkins Coie, Paul Weiss, WilmerHale, etc.
As law students and lawyers around the world know, these are some of the crème de la crème of the profession. A collection of some of the top law firms that provide legal advice to some of the biggest companies on the planet.
Trump’s executive orders seek to change that in an unprecedented way. Never has an American President targeted a series of law firms simply because they represented or hired an adversary of his from a previous investigation or litigation. The recent WilmerHale Executive Order, for example, targeted their behavior of hiring two lawyers who worked on the Mueller Investigation. As you may recall, that investigation concluded that Trump had engaged in behavior that could be prosecuted, but Robert Mueller declined to do so because of a DOJ policy prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president.
The executive orders read like many of Trump’s tweets — “The dishonest and dangerous…
