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Law Firms

Paul Weiss leader cites potential ‘existential crisis’ as 1 reason for Trump deal; critics include 141 firm alumni

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 24, 2025, 1:49 pm CDT

An executive order targeting Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison “could easily have destroyed our firm,” the law firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, told employees in a March 23 statement defending the deal that he reached with President Donald Trump.

Karp’s message, printed by Original Jurisdiction, said Paul Weiss was facing an “existential crisis” as a result of a March 14 executive order by Trump. The order had suspended security clearances held by people at the firm, restricted their access to government buildings, required government contractors to disclose whether they do business with the firm, and required agencies to take steps to terminate contracts with Paul Weiss or its clients.

The executive order is being revoked as a result of the deal, Trump announced in a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, March 20. According to Trump, the deal provides that Paul Weiss:

  • Will not deny representation to clients because of lawyers’ personal political views.

  • Will take on a wide variety of pro bono matters that represent the full spectrum of political viewpoints.

  • Will dedicate $40 million in pro bono legal services “to support the administration’s initiatives, including: assisting our nation’s veterans, fairness in the justice system, the president’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and other mutually agreed projects.”

  • “Affirms its commitment to merit-based hiring, promotion and retention and will not adopt, use or pursue any DEI policies.”

Karp sent a copy of the agreement to firm employees that differs from Trump’s description, the New York Times reports. Karp’s version does not mention DEI, but it did affirm a commitment to merits-based employment practices and to hire an outside expert to audit those practices.

Karp also said under the agreement, “the administration is not dictating what matters we take on, approving our matters or anything like that.”

The Truth Social post also quoted a White House statement that said Karp had “acknowledged the wrongdoing of former Paul Weiss partner Mark Pomerantz,” who worked on a criminal case against Trump while he was with the New York district attorney’s office. But Karp’s copy of the agreement did not mention Pomerantz, who has denied doing anything wrong, according to the New York Times.

Karp negotiated the agreement just a few months after suffering a heart attack, the New York Times reports in another article. The deal was supported by “the vast majority” of the firm’s partners, the New York Times said, which relied on anonymous sources.

Karp said he was initially “hopeful that the legal industry would rally to our side” after Trump issued the executive order. Instead “certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys,” he said.

Paul Weiss initially planned to challenge the executive order in a lawsuit, but it soon became clear that a successful legal challenge “would not solve the fundamental problem, which was that clients perceived our firm as being persona non grata with the administration,” Karp said. In reaching a deal, Karp said, “we were guided by our obligation to protect our clients’ interests” and the need to ensure that the firm would survive.

Critics of the deal include 141 Paul Weiss alumni who signed a March 24 letter protesting the firm’s decision, according to a March 24 press release.

“We expected the firm to be a leader in standing up for the legal profession, the adversary system and the right to counsel,” the letter said. “Instead of a ringing defense of the values of democracy, we witnessed a craven surrender to, and thus complicity in, what is perhaps the gravest threat to the independence of the legal profession since at least the days of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.”

Taking the other side is Stephen Gillers, a professor at the New York University School of Law, who told Law.com that Paul Weiss “had no obligation to fight Trump in court.”

The firm “has obligations to its clients, who must deal with the federal government regularly as an adversary or a regulator, and to its thousands of employees, including lawyers,” he said.

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White Collar Crime

Trump pauses enforcement of foreign bribery law, cites harm to ‘American economic competitiveness’

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 11, 2025, 3:24 pm CST

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday that that generally pauses enforcement of a law that bars companies operating in the United States from bribing foreign officials.

The Feb. 10 order requires U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to formulate updated guidelines for enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that “prioritize American interests, American economic competitiveness with respect to other nations, and the efficient use of federal law enforcement resources.”

Bondi has 180 days to work on the guidelines and has the option of extending the period for another 180 days, the order said. During that time, Bondi should stop new Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations or enforcement actions, the order said. She is also required to review existing investigations and actions, taking action to restore proper bounds on enforcement. Bondi can determine whether an exception to the pause should be made in individual cases, however.

A White House fact sheet said “unpredictable FCPA enforcement” makes American companies less competitive. Overenforcement of the law also interferes with Trump’s authority to conduct foreign affairs under Article II of the Constitution, the document said.

Bondi issued a memo Feb. 5 that directs Department of Justice lawyers to prioritize Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prosecutions in which foreign bribery facilitated crimes of cartels and transnational criminal organizations, according to an analysis by Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer. The law firm also said the statute of limitations in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases “outruns the Trump administration,” meaning that a prosecution could be fair game after Trump leaves office.

Publications with coverage of Trump’s order include Reuters, CNBC, Fox News and the New York Times.

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Attorneys for President-elect Donald Trump on Monday asked the judge overseeing his New York City-based hush-money case to dismiss the indictment and vacate the jury’s guilty verdicts.

In an 80-page filing, attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove say three distinct sources of federal law “require” the defense’s requested “result” and those legal sources “require it immediately.”

But the penultimate filing in the case actually begins with an invocation of current events: President Joe Biden’s pardon of his adult son Hunter Biden’s felony gun conviction and any would-be crimes.

“Yesterday, in issuing a 10-year pardon to Hunter Biden that covers any and all crimes whether charged or uncharged, President Biden asserted that his son was ‘selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,’ and ‘treated differently,”” the filing, docketed Tuesday, reads.

Attorneys for former President Donald Trump on Thursday moved to dismiss the Jan. 6 case on the basis that special counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed and has unlawfully spent tens of millions of dollars “on his unjust and unwarranted prosecutions.”

The 30-page proposed motion to dismiss and for injunctive relief is premised on arguments that previously held the day in the Southern District of Florida. Namely, Trump’s attorneys argue the prosecutor in charge of the case was given his authority in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s appointments and appropriations clauses.

While those arguments did prove successful in one courtroom, in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has, so far, appeared disdainful of the idea that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s summer decision might be cited as controlling precedent.

That’s no problem for the 45th president — his latest motion largely relies on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

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Tort Law

2nd Circuit cites push notifications to jurors as one reason why Sarah Palin deserves new defamation trial

By Debra Cassens Weiss

August 28, 2024, 2:54 pm CDT

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a Republican, is entitled to a new trial in her defamation case against the New York Times, partly because a jury finding of no liability was marred by push notifications received by jurors, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at New York said U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York wrongly intruded on the province of the jury when he ruled during deliberations that the case should be dismissed because of insufficient evidence that the newspaper and one of its editors acted with actual malice.

Rakoff allowed the jury to issue a verdict anyway, and it found no liability. But the verdict was marred by some of Rakoff’s decisions and by push notifications that some jurors received about Rakoff’s finding of no actual malice, the appeals court said in its Aug. 28 opinion.

Law360 covered the 2nd Circuit’s decision in favor of Palin, a Republican who was the 2008 vice presidential candidate. She had sued over a June 2017 editorial linking the shooting of a Democratic congresswoman with a digital crosshairs graphic published by Palin’s political action committee.

Rakoff’s law clerk had learned about the push notifications when interviewing jurors following the verdict to see whether they had problems understanding the legal instructions.

A push notification from a news application can appear at the top of a cellphone or on a lockscreen even when the app is closed, the 2nd Circuit explained.

Jurors said they were not prejudiced by the push notifications, which were “an unfortunate surprise” to Rakoff, the appeals court said. But Rakoff was wrong in concluding that the jury verdict was not prejudiced, the appeals court concluded.

“Given a judge’s special position of influence with a jury, we think a jury’s verdict reached with the knowledge of the judge’s already-announced disposition of the case will rarely be untainted, no matter what the jurors say upon subsequent inquiry,” the 2nd Circuit said. “We therefore conclude that a new trial is warranted on this basis.”

The 2nd Circuit panel also said Rakoff erred by excluding some evidence offered by Palin and by improper jury instructions.

The New York Times editorial had linked a 2011 shooting that wounded then-U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, a Democrat from Arizona, to a map by Palin’s political action committee showing targeted electoral districts in a crosshairs. Six people were killed in the shooting, including a federal judge.

The New York Times had declared that “the link to political incitement was clear,” even though the attack was viewed as stemming from the perpetrator’s mental illness, according to the 2nd Circuit.

The New York Times later issued corrections saying the crosshairs were placed over targeted electoral districts, not photos of politicians, and saying there was no established link between political rhetoric and the shooting.

Palin sued the New York Times and James Bennet, then the editorial page editor, who had written the sentence about the link to political incitement being clear.

The 2nd Circuit said Rakoff should have allowed evidence that Bennet’s brother, Michael Bennet, was a Colorado Democratic U.S. senator, that Bennet was involved in his brother’s 2010 reelection bid, that the crosshairs map targeted the districts of two Democrats in the House of Representatives who endorsed Bennet’s brother, and that Palin had endorsed the person running against Sen. Bennet.

The appeals court said the evidence was relevant, and it could lead a reasonable juror to infer that Bennet had “a reason to personally dislike Palin, and that it was therefore more likely that he intentionally or recklessly, rather than inadvertently, connected her” to the shooter who wounded Giffords.

Rakoff should also have allowed introduction of three prior New York Times opinion articles that could “be plausibly read” as casting significant doubt on links between the shooting and the crosshairs map, the 2nd Circuit said. Bennet had testified that he “must have read” the prior articles.

Judge John M. Walker Jr., an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush, wrote the panel opinion. It was the second time that the 2nd Circuit ruled in the case. Rakoff had previously tossed the case without a trial, but the appeals court ruled in 2019 that he followed the wrong procedure and reinstated the lawsuit.

The case is Palin v. New York Times Co.

One day after federal prosecutors said his arguments in favor of an early prison exit were “footless,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is trying to “take advantage” of the First Step Act, criminal justice reform signed into law and “championed” by then President Donald Trump, in a bid for some leniency on his punishment for the “non-violent” offense of stonewalling the Jan. 6 Committee.

The Friday reply from Bannon, which comes weeks after he asked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to reimpose bail pending appeal based on “significant events,” reiterated that the federal inmate’s contempt of Congress stint behind bars should end before Election Day.