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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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Judiciary

Federal judge’s warning about potential violence after Trump’s comments was not ethics violation, 3rd Circuit says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 25, 2025, 3:29 pm CDT

A federal judge didn’t violate ethics rules when he commented about the potential for violence when “people in positions of authority” make negative comments about a judge or the judge’s family members, according to a federal appellate judicial council.

Senior U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton of Washington, D.C., didn’t comment on the merits of a pending matter and did not engage in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice, said Chief Judge Michael A. Chagares of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Philadelphia. Chagares wrote the opinion for the 3rd Circuit’s judicial council that dismissed two ethics complaints against Walton.

Reuters and Law360 have coverage.

Chagares’ Jan. 31 opinion, which was released last week, did not identify Walton as the judge in question. But a Walton representative confirmed to Law360 and Reuters that he was the subject of the opinion.

Walton had commented on CNN on March 28, 2024, in response to a question about then-candidate Donald Trump’s social media attacks against New York Judge Juan Merchan, according to prior coverage by Reuters. Merchan was presiding in a case accusing Trump of falsifying business records to conceal a hush-money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Trump was convicted in May 2024.

Trump had criticized Merchan as a “radical left judge” and a Trump hater at “the highest level” in a March 22, 2024, post on Truth Social, his social media platform, according to another prior story by Reuters. Trump also labeled Merchan’s daughter a “rabid Trump hater” before Walton appeared on CNN.

Reuters published this comment by Walton: “I think it’s very important that people in positions of authority be very circumspect in reference to the things that they say, so that they’re not causing others to act on what they say and maybe cause injury or death to someone as a result of that.”

Law360 referred to additional comments from Walton’s interview.

“I can’t get into someone’s mind to say whether they appreciate the impact that they’re doing, but I would think that he’s—any reasonable thinking person would appreciate that when they say things, they can sometimes resonate with others,” Walton said. “And I think that’s particularly true when you have somebody who has status in our society, and they make certain statements that can cause people to act on those statements, even if they don’t necessarily intend for someone to do so.”

None of Walton’s remarks concerned the merits of Trump’s case, and they do not constitute partisan political activity, Chagares said.

“Rather, [Walton] spoke about the experience of receiving threats, reflected on the tragedy of colleagues whose family members had been killed, and encouraged circumspection with respect to public remarks that can have unintended consequences,” Chagares said. Walton “also emphasized the importance of the independence of judicial officers in maintaining the rule of law and ensuring that laws are applied equally to all who appear before a judge.”

Chagares did not identify who filed the complaints. But conservative activist Mike Davis, the founder of the Article III Project, a conservative group, has said he filed one of them.

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Before artificial intelligence became a common legal tool, Jacqueline Schafer was hooked on it.

This was back in 2018, and Schafer, a litigator who had started her career in BigLaw at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and spent several years doing appellate work as an assistant attorney general in Washington and Alaska, was working as in-house counsel at a national nonprofit. She had taken on her first pro bono asylum case, representing a mother and her toddler at risk for deportation to Honduras.

“There were really terribly scary stakes, and at the final hearing, the judge was very biased,” Schafer recalls. So she pointed the judge toward one of her exhibits showcasing the medical evidence.

In an asylum hearing, Schafer says, you have one final chance to show the judge why your client deserves asylum. “I had written a long brief where I referenced factual evidence, like the medical declaration. But what truly appeared to make the difference was when the judge went directly to review the declaration himself,” says Schafer, 42.

The experience helped Schafer envision how technology could make this simple for every judge: With the click of a button, they could access hyperlinked pleadings.

“The case really had a huge impact on how I thought about change,” she says. “We could make it so much less stressful to prepare the documents.”

In 2020, Schafer raised capital for what would soon become Clearbrief, a system using AI to search through volumes of discovery to find relevant facts and related concepts. Once the data is extracted, Clearbrief provides a fact-checking link that displays every cited source and scores how well other evidence in the record supports it.

“Just the idea of Clearbrief was transformational,” says Mark Britton, a former lawyer, founding investor in Clearbrief and Expedia executive who founded the legal marketplace Avvo. “The idea that whatever you assert or would like to assert in a brief is rated by an AI assistant that tells you how supported the assertion is in both the facts and the law—I immediately had goosebumps.”

Clearbrief is used by hundreds of law firms, including large global firms, courts and government agencies, Schafer says. And it can help smaller law firms compete with larger ones, says Joseph McMullen, an attorney in San Diego who used the technology for a big immigration case last year, winning $1.5 million for his clients.

“Justice and accountability in the courts can feel elusive for people without pockets deep enough to afford expensive law firms with large document review teams to distill vast amounts of records and data down to their essential facts,” says McMullen, who relied on Clearbrief to help him with a case against Customs and Border Patrol after it kept two children in an underground holding area for 33 hours before being released.

Schafer says the process of building Clearbrief has been one gigantic lesson in learning. She did not have a tech background, so she reached out to many people prominent in the tech field, asking each if she could meet them for coffee to talk about AI.

“That’s how I learned,” she says. “I had to be humble: I sounded like an idiot at first, and lawyers are afraid of looking foolish.”

But it worked. She learned venture capital and AI lingo, and built her vision piece by piece with a goal that every pleading prepared globally will be written with Clearbrief.

“We’re at a tipping point that I dreamed about: When a certain number of the larger firms start using it, then others hear about it,” she says.

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast:

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Education Law

Is racism against whites ‘edgy and exciting’? Potential SCOTUS pick pens dissent supporting bullied student

By Debra Cassens Weiss

November 18, 2024, 3:22 pm CST

A Texas high school student who said he was bullied and harassed for being a white Trump supporter won’t be able to pursue his lawsuit under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as a result of an evenly divided decision by a federal appeals court.

The split Nov. 13 decision of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at New Orleans had the effect of upholding a federal judge’s decision to dismiss the suit, report Bloomberg Law, Reuters and Law360. The plaintiff was a minor referred to as “B.W.”

The 5th Circuit’s decision noted the split, with nine judges on each side of the issue. Four justices explained why they thought that B.W. could not pursue his claim under Title VI, which bans discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin by recipients of federal funds.

Nine others judges explained why they disagreed, and two of those judges declared in a separate dissent that “our culture today increasingly accepts (if not celebrates) racism against whites.”

The author of the two-judge dissent was Judge James C. Ho, who was joined by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan. Both have been mentioned as potential U.S. Supreme Court nominees if President-elect Donald Trump gets a chance to appoint a justice during his administration.

“It’s racist to characterize whites as racist,” Ho wrote. “Because it’s racist to attach any negative trait to a group of people based on their race. And it’s no less racist just because the victimized racial group is white.”

B.W. had alleged that he was “mocked, physically beaten and verbally abused” while a middle school and high school student at the Austin Independent School District in Texas, according to the nine-judge dissent written by Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod.

One student said he was going to “beat the s- – – out of” B.W. because he was white and then did so, B.W. alleged. A teaching aide referred to B.W. as “Whitey” and belittled him for struggling with lessons, asking, “Can’t figure this one out, Whitey” A teacher allegedly mocked B.W. for listening to “white gospel music,” another expressed concern about the number of white people, and a third objected to a white man talking about gender issues. One student made a meme of B.W. dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman.

The four-judge concurrence, written by Judge Priscilla Richman, said it is “sickening and reprehensible” that a student would have to be subjected to the treatment that B.W. alleged.

But the suit makes clear that B.W. was bullied and harassed because of his political beliefs and the contrary beliefs held by classmates, the concurrence said. Any bullying based on race was not so severe and pervasive that it deprived him of educational opportunities, Richman said.

Elrod’s dissent said the suit should survive because the allegations “plausibly amount to severe, pervasive and objectively offensive racial harassment.”

Ho’s dissent noted that the Supreme Court recently granted cert in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services to decide whether courts may require members of majority groups suing under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to present special evidence of “background circumstances” to support their claims.

The plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, Mariam Ames, is a straight white woman who alleges that she was demoted from an administrator position that was then filled by a gay man, according to previous coverage by Law.com. She had unsuccessfully sought a promotion for a job later filled by a gay woman.

Federal appeals courts are split on whether majority group members must make a special showing in discrimination cases, Ho wrote in his dissent in the B.W. case.

There should be no dispute that white people are entitled to the same legal protections as any other racial group, Ho said.

Ho said law professors teach that angry white people are fearful of racial diversity, and white evangelicals are waging war on democracy. University students are told that talking to white people can “suck you dry.”

“So it’s not surprising that more institutions increasingly believe that they have cultural permission to tolerate (if not encourage) racism against whites, under the guise of promoting diversity,” Ho wrote. “Racism is now edgy and exciting—so long as it’s against whites.”

Martin Cirkiel, a lawyer for the student, told Reuters that he will ask the Supreme Court to hear the case, B.W. v. Austin Independent School District.

A conservative attorney rumored as a potential top cabinet appointee for president-elect Donald Trump issued a stark warning to New York Attorney General Letitia James on Thursday.

“Let me just say this to ‘Big Tish’ James, the New York attorney general: I dare you. I dare you to try to continue your lawfare against President Trump in his second term because listen here, sweetheart, we’re not messing around this time,” Mike Davis, the former chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said.

The threat was then crystallized with a body-shaming insult about the Empire State’s top law enforcement official.

“We will put your fat a–– in prison for conspiracy against rights,” Davis said during an appearance on “The Benny Show,” the eponymous YouTube program hosted by conservative columnist Benny Johnson.

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Judiciary

Judge faces potential discipline for allowing secretary to work remotely

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 8, 2024, 9:55 am CST

An ethics complaint alleges that a New Jersey judge abused the power of his office by allowing his secretary to work remotely in violation of office policy.

The New Jersey Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct accused Judge Douglas H. Hurd in a Jan. 30 ethics complaint, Law.com reports. He is the civil presiding judge in the Mercer vicinage in Trenton, New Jersey.

According to the ethics complaint, courts were working remotely beginning in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. When the judiciary resumed in-person operations, it instituted a policy in September 2021 that allowed one day weekly of remote work for eligible staff members who obtained approval. The policy was updated in April 2022 to allow two days of remote work each week.

Judges, secretaries of judges and judicial law clerks were not eligible for remote work, however.

Hurd’s secretary, identified as “L.C.” in the ethics complaint, moved out of New Jersey in 2021 and obtained an exemption from a residency requirement. She began working remotely “on a periodic basis,” with Hurd’s “knowledge and consent,” when the remote work policy began in September 2021, the ethics complaint said. She continued to work remotely until December 2022.

When Hurd was interviewed by advisory committee staff members, he acknowledged that L.C. worked remotely for about six months in 2022 and he authorized it, thinking that he had the power to do so.

The ethics complaint alleges that Hurd abused the power and prestige of his office to benefit his secretary, demonstrated an inability to conform his conduct to the high standards expected of judges, and failed to act in a manner that promoted public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.

A person who identified himself as Hurd’s law clerk told the ABA Journal that the judge had no comment at this point.

The metaverse is all the rage these days. Users can enter a virtual world where they can interact with people from all parts of the physical world, play games, engage in commerce and do a lot of other things. Think Ready Player One, or for older folks, think The Matrix movies, Total Recall or even Disclosure.

Some law firms have seen the potential of the metaverse, using the platform as a means of marketing themselves, as well as meeting and interacting with clients—no matter where they may be physically located. It especially came in handy during pandemic-related lockdowns, when people couldn’t leave their houses.

One such firm is Grungo Colarulo, a personal injury law firm with offices in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Last December, the firm announced that it had set up shop in the virtual world known as Decentraland.

Users can enter the firm’s virtual office, where they can interact with the firm’s avatar. They can talk to the avatar to see whether they might need legal representation and then take down a phone number to call the firm in the physical world. If they’re already clients, they can arrive for meetings or consultations.

Richard Grungo Jr., co-founder and name partner at Grungo Colarulo, told the ABA Journal in December 2021 that he could see the potential of the metaverse to allow his firm to host webinars, CLEs and other virtual educational opportunities, as well as hosting charity events.

Grungo joined the ABA Journal’s Victor Li to talk about how lawyers can use the metaverse to market themselves, as well as legal issues relating to the technology that all users should be aware of.

See also:

ABAJournal.com: “Major law firm buys property in the metaverse and opens virtual office”

ABA Journal: “The metaverse and Web3 are all the rage, but the law is stuck at Web1”