When some of the nation’s biggest law firms agreed to deals with President Trump, the terms appeared straightforward: In return for escaping the full force of his retribution campaign, the firms would do some free legal work on behalf of largely uncontroversial causes like helping veterans.
Mr. Trump, it turns out, has a far more expansive view of what those firms can be called on to do.
Over the last week, he has suggested that the firms will be drafted into helping him negotiate trade deals.
He has mused about having them help with his goal of reviving the coal industry.
And he has hinted that he sees the promises of nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal services that he has extracted from the elite law firms — including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — as a legal war chest to be used as he wishes.
“Have you noticed that lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump: $100 million, another $100 million for damages that they’ve done,” Mr. Trump said at an event last week with coal miners, without specifying what he meant by damages.
None of the firms have acknowledged any wrongdoing. They were targeted with punitive executive orders or implicit threats for representing or aiding Mr. Trump’s political foes or employing people he sees as having used the legal system to come after him.
The deals have been widely criticized, as they are seen by many in the legal community as unconstitutional and undemocratic. Four firms whom Mr. Trump leveled executive orders against have fought them in court, all quickly receiving rulings from federal judges who temporarily halted them.
But now that nine firms have agreed to deals and committed to nearly $1 billion worth of pro bono legal work, some Trump advisers have started having discussions about a range of options for what the firms’ lawyers can be deployed to work on, according to two people briefed on the matter. That work could include sending the lawyers to help Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or deploying them to aid the Justice Department, they said.
White House officials believe that some of the pro bono legal work could even be used toward representing Mr. Trump or his allies if they became ensnared in investigations, according to the two people.
Asked about what Mr. Trump would seek from the firms, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the firms had “committed to hundreds of millions in pro bono work and other free legal services” that should be put to the “best uses” for the American people.
“These agreements are historic, unprecedented and fully binding,” she said. “The president and his administration fully expect the law firms to live up to their commitments, and have received no indication otherwise.”
The agreements, which Mr. Trump announced on his social media site, appear to leave room for interpretation. It is unclear whether the firms even signed formal written deals spelling out the terms, or if they were essentially handshake agreements.
It is also not clear how hard and how far Mr. Trump will push the notion that those deals now leave many of the nation’s biggest, most prestigious and best-resourced firms at his beck and call. There is no indication yet that he has sought to deploy any of them on a particular issue.
But the emerging gap between what the firms initially thought they agreed to and what Mr. Trump says they can be used for shows how the deals did little to insulate them from his whims. Further demands on the firms from Mr. Trump could raise the potential for conflicts with paying clients and could further fuel internal dissension.
“They thought they made one-shot deals which they would fulfill,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale Law School who was an author of a paper that called executive orders targeting the firms unconstitutional retaliatory measures. “But the administration seems to think that they have subjected these firms to indentured servitude.”
All nine firms that reached deals with Mr. Trump declined to comment or did not respond. The other firms that made deals include Latham & Watkins; Milbank; Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; A & O Shearman; Kirkland & Ellis; and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.
One lawyer directly involved in some of the agreements said he feared that Mr. Trump’s comments could lead to the deals unraveling.
Leaders of some of the firms have seen Mr. Trump’s comments in recent days and are just hoping that Mr. Trump will not follow through and press them to take on work on behalf of the administration, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Although judges have temporarily barred executive orders issued by Mr. Trump against four firms from going into effect, raising doubts about their constitutionality, corporate lawyers at Paul Weiss were so fearful of simply appearing at odds with the administration that they pushed the firm to settle instead of file a lawsuit.
If the firms that made deals rebuffed new demands from Mr. Trump, that would force the president to decide whether he believed that the firms were in violation of the agreement and whether to level new executive orders against them.
Mr. Trump was first to announce all of the arrangements on his terms, on his social media platform Truth Social. The firms said little publicly, and communicated only over internal firm emails what their thinking about the terms of the agreement had been. The uncertainty over the existence of formal contracts has left unclear what if any enforcement mechanisms there might be.
At Paul Weiss and Skadden, some lawyers are concerned that a showdown with the White House is inevitable. If they are pushed to provide legal work beyond what they agreed to, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters, some lawyers are expected to quit.
Two people said that Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss, was very clear with the firm’s top leadership that his agreement with Mr. Trump was essentially a codification of work that Paul Weiss already does, a message echoed by leaders of other firms about their agreements.
Mr. Karp did suggest to the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter, that Paul Weiss do work for a potential U.S. sovereign wealth fund.
In internal communications with their employees, several of the settling firms said the pro bono commitments they agreed to are consistent with free legal services they already provide.
In a firmwide email, leaders at Kirkland emphasized that the “firm will continue to determine which matters we take on both pro bono and otherwise — consistent with our nonpartisan mind-set,” according to a copy of the message reviewed by The New York Times. In an email to its staff, A & O Shearman, which also reached a deal with the White House last week, said the firm was “completely free to choose whether or not we wish to work on any particular pro bono matter.”
Jeremy London, an executive partner at Skadden, struck a similar tone in explaining the deal in a firmwide email, saying that the firm had agreed to commit $100 million of pro bono work that “the president and Skadden both support,” among others, according to the email reviewed by The Times.
Some lawyers at Skadden clung to that line in Mr. London’s email, believing that it could ultimately protect the firm from being strong-armed into doing certain work, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
As these law firms navigate the shifting terms of their agreements with Mr. Trump, they are also contending with criticism from within.
Much of the loudest disapproval has come from some of the associates, typically younger lawyers who do not have any sway in the firm’s decision-making but often do the bulk of the essential work. Within days of the deals being announced at Skadden, Paul Weiss, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, Latham & Watkins and Kirkland, a few quit their jobs, posting their resignations on LinkedIn.
Any work for the administration that gets into policy positions could create conflicts with a firm’s big corporate clients — especially if those clients’ interests are at odds with those of the administration. A group of legal ethics experts made this very point in a so-called amicus brief filed on Friday in support of two law firms that opted to take the Trump administration to court after being hit with an executive order.
And if the administration seeks to require any of the firms to do work for the Justice Department, those that have cases before the department could lose clients that are under federal investigation.
“A firm that can survive only by staying in the president’s good graces,” the professors wrote in their amicus brief, “has incentives that conflict with its lawyers’ stringent fiduciary duties to remain loyal to the interests of their clients, exercise independent judgment, and be truthful and candid in all dealings with the courts.”
Michael S. Schmidt is an investigative reporter for The Times covering Washington. His work focuses on tracking and explaining high-profile federal investigations.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on the second, nonconsecutive term of Donald J. Trump.
Matthew Goldstein is a Times reporter who covers Wall Street and white-collar crime and housing issues.
Jessica Silver-Greenberg is a Times investigative reporter writing about big business with a focus on health care. She has been a reporter for more than a decade.
Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, covering President Trump.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York.
The post Law Firms Made Deals With Trump. Now He Wants More From Them. appeared first on New York Times.
