Law Firm That Caved To Trump Is Ripped By Descendants Of Firm’s Patriarch

One of the powerhouse law firms that caved to President Donald Trump and agreed to provide him with millions in pro bono legal services to avoid an executive order targeting it has been admonished by the family of one of the firm’s late partners who accuse it of cowering and caving to Trump.

“We were utterly stunned,” two granddaughters of the late Judge Simon Rifkind, who was a name partner with the international firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, wrote of their reaction in a letter to the firm’s chairman, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times.

“You traveled to Washington to surrender before you had even begun to fight,” Amy and Nina Rifkind, who are both practicing lawyers, wrote to Brad Karp in a letter dated March 27.

The nearly 150-year-old law firm, colloquially known as Paul Weiss, agreed to $40 million in free legal services to avoid being federally blackballed in part due to one of the firm’s former attorneys overseeing an investigation into Trump’s finances before he became president.

Trump’s executive order was one of several he signed against large law firms whose lawyers have been involved in work that he has disagreed with.

Three other firms — Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and Milbank — have also each pledged $100 million in free legal work to Trump to avoid legal retaliation. Some of Trump’s other targeted law firms have vowed to fight his challenges.

In their letter, Amy and Nina Rifkind said that their grandfather never would have rolled over to Trump’s threat without a fight. They also stressed that “when the country hovers between a new authoritarianism and its longstanding freedoms, that what is good for the nation and rule of law is good for Paul, Weiss, not the other way around.”

“We are confident that neither our grandfather, nor his colleagues with whom he built Paul, Weiss, would have negotiated a truce for themselves when the rest of the legal professional remains under threat for doing its jobs as lawyers,” they wrote.

Going forward, the women asked that Karp stop “invoking our grandfather’s name to justify your actions” and that he “support publicly the law firms that are opposing governmental attacks for the clients they advise and the attorneys they hire and to defend the erosion of the rule of law in the courts.”

More than 140 former Paul Weiss associates and staffers also signed a public letter last month that protested the firm’s “craven surrender” to Trump.

“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 read. “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 Senator Joseph McCarthy.”

Karp expressed gratitude to Trump in a statement issued by the White House after the executive order was dropped against the firm.

“We are gratified that the President has agreed to withdraw the Executive Order concerning Paul, Weiss. We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration,” he said.