Students Track Law Firm Responses to Trump’s Threats

A group of law students from Georgetown University is indexing law firms’ responses to President Donald Trump’s orders to sanction legal practitioners he’s accused of engaging “in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation.” And publishing such information may be making it harder for the law firms that have caved to Trump’s demands to recruit new lawyers, the court-focused publication All Rise News reported Thursday. 

That follows reporting from Politico earlier this month that showed that law students are eager to work for firms standing up to Trump.  

The Georgetown students created a spreadsheet that categorizes more than 850 law firms into five groups: “Caved to Administration,” “Complying in Advance,” “Other Negative Action,” “Stood Up Against Administration’s Attacks” and “No Response.”

Since starting his second term in January, Trump has attempted to discredit, ignore and enact revenge upon lawyers and judges who have investigated or challenged him. He’s threatened to revoke some law firms’ security clearances, federal contracts and access to federal buildings if they don’t comply with his demands, which include eliminating any diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and providing the government free legal services for causes that “represent the full political spectrum, including Conservative ideals,” as Trump wrote in a social media post. 

Some of the lawyers and firms Trump has targeted include Marc Elias, who represented Trump’s former political rival and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton; Perkins Coie, a Seattle-based firm that regularly represents members of the Democratic Party; and Paul, Weiss, which previously employed an attorney who investigated Trump’s finances.  

While Perkins Coie is suing the Trump administration—a move some 500 other law firms have backed—nine of the nation’s top firms, including Paul, Weiss; Skadden Arps; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher, have already “caved” to Trump, according to the spreadsheet.

The list apparently matters to students and the firms, Mari Latibashvili, one of the organizers of the spreadsheet, told All Rise News: “Firms have been emailing us asking to be added to the tracker, have their designation changed, and/or have other edits made to their entries,” Latibashvili said, noting that the “Stood Up Against Administration’s Attacks” designation is the most desired.