Paul Weiss, the New York law firm that this week struck a deal to escape President Trump’s wrath, is one of the nation’s largest, with more than 1,000 lawyers representing some of the world’s wealthiest and most profitable companies.
The firm, formally called Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, has offices around the world. Its work involves mergers and acquisitions, private equity, white-collar and regulatory defense and litigation. Clients have included corporations like ExxonMobil, Citigroup, Imagine Entertainment and Lucasfilm.
Paul Weiss’s revenue was more than $2.6 billion last year, according to Law360. The firm also has a large pro bono practice of public service work, some of which will now be performed for causes championed by President Trump, according to the deal.
The president had issued an executive order, part of a broader campaign against law firms, which would have suspended Paul Weiss’s security clearances and barred its lawyers from federal buildings. To persuade the president to lift the order, the firm agreed to do $40 million worth of pro bono work on causes, such as working with veterans and fighting antisemitism, over the course of Mr. Trump’s term.
But the deal with Mr. Trump has led some critics to charge that Paul Weiss betrayed its principles by giving in to the president rather than fighting him in court.
The firm is known for giving a home to prominent Democrats, like Theodore C. Sorensen, who was an adviser to President John F. Kennedy.
Among its current partners are Loretta E. Lynch, who served as attorney general under President Barack Obama; Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; and Jeh C. Johnson, a former secretary of homeland security under Mr. Obama.
The firm set up shop in 1875 at 243 Broadway, initially representing merchant and investment banking houses, real estate developers, oil and railroad interests and other clients, according to the Paul Weiss website.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when law firms in New York were beginning to expand, Paul Weiss was one the few large firms that would hire and promote Jewish law school graduates, said Eli Wald, a professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
“During this discriminatory era, Paul Weiss emerged and grew as a mixed law firm, a coming together of Jewish and non-Jewish lawyers to form a more welcoming and diverse large law firm,” he said.
Among the law firm’s principles, which are posted on its website, is one that says “We believe in maintaining, by affirmative efforts, a membership of partners and associates reflecting a wide variety of religious, political, ethnic and social backgrounds, characteristic of that community.”
Paul Weiss’s chairman, Brad Karp, emailed the law firm on Thursday evening, seeking to reassure its lawyers and other employees that the deal reached with Mr. Trump “reaffirmed” the firm’s long held principles.
The principles, dating to 1963, are credited to one of the firm’s original named partners, Judge Simon H. Rifkind, a renowned trial lawyer who had also served on the federal bench in the Southern District of New York; he died in 1995.
Another precept is to act “as members of a free democratic society with responsibilities both to our profession and our country.”
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