Since late March, for several hours nearly every weekday, Olga Hartwell has quietly stood outside the UBS building at 1285 Sixth Avenue, headquarters of the law firm Paul Weiss, with signs that say things like “Paul Weiss Lawyers, Please Stand Up for the Rule of Law.” Often she is accompanied by her husband, Chris Hartwell, who has his own signs. In recent weeks, the Hartwells — she is in her 60s, and he in his 70s — have been joined by several others drawn to their cause, which ideally would have the firm reconsider its capitulation to the Trump administration.
There are 17 among them and they divvy up the week to ensure that someone is more or less always outside. Lawyers, bankers, young Midtown office workers, students, security guards and homeless people have all approached them to ask questions, or argue, or offer support or buy them coffee. Ms. Hartwell said she was once approached by someone at UBS, a veteran who told her that what the government was doing now was not what he had fought for. Contacted about Ms. Hartwell’s effort, a representative for Paul Weiss did not respond.
Two months ago, the law firm agreed to perform $40 million worth of pro bono work for causes advanced by the White House in order to prevent the administration from barring its lawyers from entering federal buildings. This would have effectively prevented the firm from representing any clients in criminal or civil cases involving the federal government. In his March 14 letter outlining his issue with Paul Weiss, President Trump singled out “unethical attorney Mark Pomerantz,” who had left the firm to join the Manhattan district attorney’s office and oversee its investigation of Mr. Trump, “solely to manufacture a prosecution against me.” The backlash against Paul Weiss in legal and business circles has been tremendous.
In a letter to The New York Times, Sally Pollak, a grandaugther of Louis S. Weiss, a founding partner of the firm, and the daughter of a federal judge and constitutional scholar who briefly worked there, wrote that her forebears would have been “horrified” by the firm’s response and “might have even called the $40 million deal a payoff.” In a letter to Paul Weiss staff members, its chairman, Brad S. Karp, defended the decision, arguing that the firm, where senior partners make up to $20 million a year, “would have been easily destroyed otherwise.”
Ms. Hartwell does not see it that way; greed, in her view, is the real problem, an apparent refusal to consider making less. “Courage is obviously hard,” she said. Serene and thoughtful in her presentation, her mode of resistance does not involve rhyming chants, drums or screaming. An Upper West Sider who knit the hat she wears on cold days, she is not reducible to whatever cliché might follow from that. Until very recently, she had never protested much of anything.
The entirety of her career was, in fact, spent in elite law circles, first as a partner at Covington & Burling, another prominent firm, and one that has resisted the Trump administration’s incursions. For a decade, she worked out of Covington’s London office, advising American corporate clients on international tax strategy. “I love tax law,” she told me, not facetiously, over coffee one morning after 90 minutes of standing on Sixth Avenue. Following her time at Covington, she went to work for GE Capital, the conglomerate’s commercial lending operation, to run its tax division.
At that point she had moved her family to Greenwich, Conn., where she sent her children to private school. She had a big house that looked like a castle, with a swimming pool. She is not, in other words, averse to making or having lots of money. She had grown up without it — in Mitchell-Lama housing in Manhattan and attending the borough’s Brearley School on a scholarship. Her parents came to this country in the mid-1950s from Serbia, where her father had struggled as an architect. In America, her mother quickly found work as a secretary at The New Yorker.
Ms. Hartwell had always admired Paul Weiss. Under its Center to Combat Hate, the firm has successfully sued white supremacist groups in a series of high-profile cases. Its response to the government’s strong-arming struck her as inconsistent and demoralizing.
“When Paul Weiss caved to the administration’s threats, I almost immediately thought of going and standing outside with a sign,” she told me. She realized, she said, that people “have so many reasons they don’t want to stand on a street corner with a sign.”
“I had been reading a lot of Hannah Arendt, and I think that simply affirming norms and reminding people of the rule of law is very important.”
Ms. Hartwell’s husband, on the face of it also an unlikely resister, joined her in the mission immediately. The two met when she was a student at Stanford Law School in the late 1980s and he was a Silicon Valley lawyer working with venture funds.
When Ms. Hartwell left GE nine years ago, her two children grown, she went back to Yale, where she had gone to college, to get a degree at the university’s divinity school. She had no plans to become a minister, she told me, but was instead deeply interested in the interplay between literature and faith. More recently, she has been writing poetry and fiction and she is currently at work on a novel about New York City in the 1970s.
Ms. Hartwell has a wide circle of friends half her age, some from divinity school, some from writers’ groups that meet deep in Brooklyn, where wealthy women in late middle age are unlikely to find themselves. I asked her if these connections informed her recent political awakening.
They had not, she told me. If anything, she was seeing many more older people drawn to activism now than younger people, who had very visibly led the wave during the first Trump administration. But the stakes seemed higher now — given the deportations, the arrests for dissent and some employers, especially in the legal field, warning that they would not hire anyone who had protested the war in Gaza, for example.
Whether or not her exercise moves Paul Weiss to revise its position, Ms. Hartwell sees herself as doing the valuable work of public relations for constitutionality. One day, she said, a young Paul Weiss employee left the building explaining that she had just resigned. Ms. Hartwell and her group took this as a victory.
“I want lawyers to walk in and out of this building and see us and realize that what is happening is a nightmare,” Ms. Hartwell said. “And that they must wake up and stand up to this bad dream.”
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
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