MORE THAN A THOUSAND associate lawyers at the nation’s most powerful and prestigious law firms are telling their bosses that it is time to stand up and be counted.
As of Monday morning, 1,390 lawyers had joined an open letter to the leaders of their respective law firms calling on them to push back against recent attacks on the legal profession by President Donald Trump’s administration.
More than a third of the signers work at law firms based, or with offices, in the Bay Area.
The letter says the associates who have joined the letter have a variety of different political views but “we are united in our condemnation of the administration’s intimidation tactics, viewpoint discrimination, and attempts to weaponize the Executive against the rule of law.”
They want their firms to do something.
The executive order
The letter focuses on a series of actions by the Trump administration that target law firms, central among them Executive Order 14230 entitled “Addressing Risks From Perkins Coie LLP” signed by Trump on March 6.
Perkins Coie is a well-known law firm based in Seattle with more than 1,200 lawyers spread among 21 offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia, including local offices in San Francisco and Palo Alto.
The executive order leads with the statement, “The dishonest and dangerous activity of (Perkins Coie) has affected this country for decades” and goes on from there to call out the firm’s work for former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and donor George Soros. It also accuses the Perkins firm of racial discrimination against its attorneys and staff through the firm’s DEI practices and programs.
The order directs the U.S. Attorney general, the director of national intelligence, and the heads of federal agencies to suspend the firm’s lawyers’ security clearances and terminate U.S. Government contracts with the firm. The order also directs that contracts between the government and clients of the Perkins firm should be terminated.
Perkins filed suit against the U.S. Department of Justice and several other federal agencies on March 11 in federal court in Washington, D.C.
On March 12, Perkins obtained a temporary restraining order directing the defendants to rescind any action taken against Perkins or its clients pending a full hearing. Initial briefs from the parties are due April 2.
Creating a ‘culture of fear’
The associates’ letter says, “The Trump administration’s message is loud, clear, and twofold. First, firms that represent those who oppose the administration’s agenda will be punished. This equates lawyers’ views with their clients’ views and undermines our profession’s commitment to ensure representation for all.”
The second thing that causes the associates to be outraged is the attempt to go after firms based on their commitment to DEI practices that have been widely utilized to give greater access to participation in a profession where partners in the largest law firms have been predominately white and male.
In their view, the actions of the administration “create a culture of fear and make our private-sector employers … subject to penalties unless the President approves of their clients and arguments.”
The letter calls on the leaders of their firms to unite in opposition to the administration’s tactics.
Rachel Cohen was one of the five main organizers of the efforts that led to the letter. Cohen was a third-year associate at the megafirm Skadden, with 1,700 lawyers and 22 offices around the world, including one in Palo Alto.
In an interview Thursday with Bay City News, Cohen said that she read the Perkins executive order “at maybe 11 o’clock at night and was in bed and was going to get eight hours of sleep, which is not very common for a third-year finance associate.”
But sleep didn’t come. “Every time I closed my eyes, I would think of a new implication.” She started texting lawyer friends and asked if others were seeing what she was seeing. She said, “I was up so late that it actually turned over from texting my friends on the West Coast to texting … (a friend) in London.” The group decided they had to do something. By mid-morning the next day, there was a draft letter circulating, while at the same time the people involved in the effort were checking to see if their firms were planning to take action, making a letter unnecessary. Cohen said the letter was a last resort.
An initial draft began circulating on March 8. Lawyers were asked to join by putting down the name of their firm and their class. They were not asked to disclose their names.
The group did not release even the firm name and class information until the number of lawyers joining reached 100, on the theory that there was safety in numbers and there was also “a lot of sentiment that if you do get fired for kind of being a troublemaker that it will be very hard to get hired again.”
The group reached a hundred by March 10, and since that time new lawyers joining the letter have been added hourly. At the time of the interview, Cohen was the only one who had publicly identified herself, though she expected others will as time goes on.
Cohen said that it is not essential for associates to identify themselves since “the action that I care about most is people taking advocacy within their firms.”
For law firm leaders she has two hopes.
She wants a critical mass of firms “to sign on to some kind of affirmative commitment that they will continue representation of both billable and pro bono clients across the spectrum, whether or not the Trump administration views those interests as adverse to them.”
She wants them to sign an amicus brief to be filed in the Perkins litigation that is currently being coordinated by lawyers at another firm. Amicus — or “friend of the court” — briefs are legal arguments filed with a court’s permission and are used in important cases to share the views of nonparties to aid the court in its decision.
Cohen resigned from Skadden on Friday, the day after her interview with BCN, out of a feeling that she was getting a “total runaround at my own firm about how we were going to handle” the issue. She posted a nine-minute explanation on her TikTok explaining her frustration at the lack of action.
Standing up
BCN reached out to the leaders of seven of the law firms with associates on the list, in the hope of getting comments on the associates’ letter. None has yet responded.
But one San Francisco law firm has indicated that they are prepared to join the amicus brief in support of the Perkins firm. On Thursday, the management committee of Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP sent an officewide email under the caption “Standing up for our values.”
Keker is a top-tier litigation boutique headquartered in San Francisco.
The email began, “when each attorney joined the California Bar, we swore an oath to support the Constitution of the United States … These words are not formalities. They embody our commitment to justice and to the rule of law.”
The firm said it would join the Perkins amicus brief and encourage other law firms to do the same. It added, “the rule of law is under attack. When the very foundations of our legal system are called into question, silence is not an option.”
Elliot Peters, a named partner of the firm, said he thought the associates’ letter “was wonderful and the sentiment in it is that we have to stand together.”
He said, “lawyers represent clients, including unpopular clients, including ones that other people hate, and if you are not willing to do that or stand up for that’s what it means to be a lawyer in America, then you are far away from John Adams and Patrick Henry and the people that put this whole thing together.”
Shanin Specter is an adjunct professor at Stanford Law School and a professor of practice at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. He is co-founder of the Philadelphia law firm Kline & Specter and involved in management of the firm. He thought the associates’ letter said a lot of important things. He would be happy for any of the lawyers in his firm to sign the letter.
He said the country and the legal profession have seen intimidation tactics in the past — he pointed to the 1950s when U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his lawyer Roy Cohn used that playbook in their hunt for suspected communists in Hollywood.
Specter said, “We look back today with admiration for the ones who stood up to McCarthy and Roy Cohn.” Specter understood that the associates’ letter could put law firm leaders — particularly those with lots of corporate clients and government contracts — in a tough spot, but he said, “I have no sympathy for a law firm that won’t stand up for its own rights and for the rights of its clients.” The executive order, in Specter’s view, is illegal and should be fought in court.
Specter said that he has faith in the federal courts. “I think the federal courts have been the most trustworthy branch of government the past hundred years. And I see no reason to think that’s going to change anytime soon.”
He added, “The answer is not to cower. The answer is to stand up.”
Joe Dworetzky, the author of this story, has been a lawyer for 45 years. As a journalist, he no longer represents clients, but remains an active member of the bar.
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