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This post isn’t quite a post in the way I normally do them, more jotting down some of my brainstorming over the weekend.
Universities are a core pillar of civil society. Law firms are not. Observers have been waiting to see what would come of an amicus-brief-organizing campaign in support of Perkins Coie, the Seattle-based firm which was the first to be targeted by the Trump administration. Perkins Coie is also, significantly, the law firm for much of the institutional Democratic Party. It finally came out, and the brief was signed by more than 500 firms across the country. But it was not signed by any of the nation’s Top 20 firms, measured by revenue. I don’t know enough about the internal finances of the nation’s top-grossing firms. But I suspect they’re mostly like Paul, Weiss, which is to say they’re largely M&A firms, at least in terms of where they make their money — M&A and the management of other corporate transactions I don’t know acronyms for. It’s basically impossible to be in that business if you’re at war with the state that regulates mergers and acquisitions.
Just after Paul, Weiss cut their deal with President Trump, I spoke to a number of people either at the firm or proximate to it. One thing they helped me understand is that for firms like that, with a big M&A practice centered on partners with books of business ranging well into the tens of millions of dollars, it’s not just the clients who disappear in a flash. The money-making partners can too. So these vast, hugely money-making entities are actually quite fragile in their own way. The equivalent of a bank run dynamic and poof, they’re gone. But law firms come and law firms go. It is what it is.