The chairman of a prominent law firm who cut a deal with President Donald Trump last week to avert the consequences of a White House executive order told colleagues in an email Sunday that he did so because the order “could easily have destroyed our firm” and put it out of business.
The message from Brad Karp offers the most detailed public explanation yet about the decision to make significant concessions to the White House in the face of an executive order that targeted his firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Garrison & Wharton.
The order, the latest in a series of similar actions targeting law firms whose lawyers have performed legal work that Trump disagrees with, threatened the suspension of security clearances for Paul Weiss attorneys as well as the termination of any federal contracts involving the firm. It cited as an explanation the fact that a former Paul Weiss attorney, Mark Pomerantz, had been a central player in an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office into Trump’s finances before Trump became president.
On Thursday evening, though, Trump announced that he had rescinded the March 14 order following a White House meeting with Karp. The White House said the firm had agreed to dedicate $40 million worth of free legal services to support certain Trump administration agenda items, including on countering antisemitism; to conduct an audit of its hiring practices and “not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI” policies; and to take on clients regardless of political affiliation.
The resolution triggered an intense backlash within the legal community, with lawyers criticizing the firm for capitulating to Trump rather than standing up to him, particularly at a time when he’s using the power of the presidency to threaten the livelihoods of attorneys and companies he believes have crossed him. The deal also reinforced Trump’s recent success in extracting concessions from a broad swath of targets, in both academia and private industry, who have opted to compromise rather than fight.
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In an email to Paul Weiss employees obtained by The Associated Press, Karp described the order as having presented an “existential crisis” for the firm. He said it was very likely the firm would not have survived a protracted fight with the Trump administration.
“The executive order could easily have destroyed our firm,” Karp wrote. “It brought the full weight of the government down on our firm, our people, and our clients. In particular, it threatened our clients with the loss of their government contracts, and the loss of access to the government, if they continued to use the firm as their lawyers. And in an obvious effort to target all of you as well as the firm, it raised the specter that the government would not hire our employees.”
Karp wrote that the firm was initially prepared to challenge the executive order in court, something another law firm targeted with a Trump executive order, Perkins Coie, has done. Even as a team of attorneys prepared a complaint, he said, “it became clear that, even if we were successful in initially enjoining the executive order in litigation, it would not solve the fundamental problem, which was that clients perceived our firm as being persona non grata with the Administration.”
He also said that the support he hoped the firm would receive from other law firms never materialized.
“Disappointingly, far from support, we learned that certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys,” he wrote.
Against that backdrop, when the firm learned that the administration might be willing to cut a deal, it sought to do so and negotiated a settlement in a “matter of days.”
“I know many of you are uncomfortable that we entered into any sort of resolution at all. That is completely understandable,” Karp wrote to his colleagues, adding that “there was no right answer to the predicament in which we found ourselves.”
He added: “It is very easy for commentators to judge our actions from the sidelines. But no one in the wider world can appreciate how stressful it is to confront an executive order like this until one is directed at you.”
The firm is one of numerous Trump targets that have recently reached agreements with the administration rather than further provoke the president’s ire.
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On Friday, for instance, Columbia University agreed to put its Middle East studies department under new supervision and overhaul its rules for protests and student discipline, acquiescing to an ultimatum by the Trump administration to implement those changes or risk losing billions of dollars in federal funding.
Meta and ABC made settlement payments to Trump’s future presidential library to end lawsuits filed by Trump. Other tech and financial firms have publicly rolled back DEI programs in line with Trump’s policy interests.
