The decision by nine of America’s biggest law firms to “bend the knee” to President Trump drew condemnation among lawyers across the political spectrum, including from attorneys inside the firms who quit or launched resistance campaigns. Others have chosen a less career-limiting form of rebellion.
That would be offering leaks to Above the Law, a pugnacious legal industry website best known for scoops about law firm annual bonuses, snarky coverage of legal news and salacious stories of barristers behaving badly. But since March, when Mr. Trump began targeting for retribution top law firms whose clients and past work he does not like, Above the Law has become a rage read for lawyers incensed at the firms that accommodated him.
Fueled by a stream of inside-the-conference-room exclusives, Above the Law delivers a daily public spanking to what it calls “The Yellow-Bellied Nine.” Those are the elite firms who pledged a collective $1 billion in free legal work to Mr. Trump after he signed executive orders threatening to bar their lawyers from federal buildings, suspend their security clearances and cancel their government contracts.
In the words of Above the Law, the firms “folded like a damp cocktail napkin” to the president’s demands for “pro bono payola.”
“For demoralized people stuck inside these firms, I think this is catharsis,” said Kevin Carroll, a Washington lawyer who once worked at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. (Quinn Emmanuel has not been threatened by Mr. Trump, although its comanaging partner, William A. Burck, was fired as an outside ethics counsel for the Trump Organization by Mr. Trump’s sons in April. Mr. Burck’s offense was signing up to also represent Harvard, one of Mr. Trump’s prime targets in his crackdown on the nation’s top colleges.)
For Mr. Carroll, the site’s skewering of mostly left-leaning legal titans stirs schadenfreude.
“I’ve always wondered,” he said, “when pressed, would rich liberal lawyers choose to stay rich or liberal? Now we know.”
A few recent headlines from the site:
“Money v. Morals: Which Will Law Students Choose When It Comes to Job Offers From Biglaw Firms That Made Deals With Trump?”
“Biglaw’s Cowards Play Dumb About Pro-Bono Payola”
“This Law Firm Had to Delete A LOT to Purge Its Diversity and Pro Bono Work”
“Biglaw Firms in League With Donald Trump Now Have to Defend Cops That Kill Black and Brown People”
Unlike most other legal industry outlets, access to Above the Law is free for anyone who supplies an email address and basic job information for use by its advertisers, who pay the bills. The site urges readers to “send us your leads, gossip, leaked documents, embarrassing photos or anything else juicy.”
Partners running billion-dollar firms have long eyed its morning newsletter like an elephant does a mouse. One partner at a top-tier firm told The New York Times that lawyers there have a rule: “Don’t do anything that could wind up in Above the Law.” The partner requested anonymity for fear of violating the rule.
“One of the comments I most appreciated,” said David Lat, the lawyer who founded Above the Law in 2006, “was from an administrative assistant who told me, ‘The partners are nicer to us because they don’t want to show up on the site as ‘The Screamer.’”
Mr. Lat is the author of the now-defunct but once widely read blog among the federal judiciary, the dishy Underneath Their Robes, which featured critiques of “superhottie” judges and courtroom celebrity sightings. Mr. Lat sold Above the Law to Breaking Media in 2019 but remains a minor investor.
The law firms have defended their deals with Mr. Trump by arguing that they simply committed to representing clients no matter their political beliefs and doing pro bono legal work on causes like helping veterans and fighting antisemitism. The site occasionally points out, however, that Mr. Trump has since suggested that the firms might be drafted into negotiating his trade deals, or defending police accused of misconduct.
Joe Patrice, one of Above the Law’s four full-time writers (all are lawyers) said that every so often, someone pings the tipster line with a demand that the site be “nicer, more bipartisan” in covering the current crisis. Mr. Patrice acknowledged that this gives him pause.
“When squeaky wheels are all you ever hear from, you wonder, are we being unfair?” he said.
To answer his own question, he wrote an article exploring whether that might be the case. He began by researching how Mr. Trump had been “bench-slapped” — a favorite term at Above the Law — by some of conservatism’s most prominent judges.
Among them is J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge, who said last month on MSNBC that Mr. Trump had “declared war on the federal judiciary, on the rule of law and on the nation’s legal profession.” Paul Clement, a solicitor general under President George W. Bush and once on Mr. Trump’s short list for a Supreme Court appointment, sued the administration on behalf of WilmerHale, and won a restraining order from a Republican-appointed judge.
“The real intellectual leaders of the conservative legal movement are more incensed than we are,” Mr. Patrice concluded.
None of the nine firms that accommodated Mr. Trump responded to requests for comment. Brad Karp, Paul Weiss’s longtime chairman, previously said in an email to colleagues that the firm’s agreement “will have no effect on our work and our shared culture and values.”
While a few lawyers interviewed by The Times found Above the Law a bit lowbrow, or “more interesting for associates than partners,” none were allowed by their firms to say so on the record, because, as one said, “I guess it might antagonize them or something.”
The outlet has scooped heftier competitors on stories, such as one on a summer associate at a New York firm who stripped down and dove into the Hudson during a charity gala. On the weightier side, there were the former editor Elie Mystal’s articles flagging allegations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh before his Supreme Court confirmation battle.
Even before Mr. Trump began issuing executive orders, Above the Law’s tipsters flagged firms that were quietly stripping pronouns from email signatures and halting diversity initiatives in hope of escaping the president’s wrath. Above the Law covered discontent at the firm A&O Shearman before it reached a deal with Mr. Trump, and chronicled leaked tales of internal revolt at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom after it became one of the first firms to accommodate Mr. Trump.
Above the Law also posted emails exposing Skadden’s efforts to disable mass distribution lists on its internal email system to, as the outlet put it, “head off anyone who might want to express their opinion about the firm becoming a cowardly laughingstock.”
Another tipster offered news of Skadden’s search for a public relations specialist, which Above the Law posted under the Onion-esque headline “Skadden Posts Dream Job for Anyone Who Hates Themselves.”
Above the Law is based in the garret-like top floor of the Cable Building, at the corner of Broadway and Houston in Manhattan. One recent rainy afternoon, the same day several more firms neared agreements with Mr. Trump, Kathryn Rubino, a writer and editor, was updating the “Biglaw Spine Index.” The index charts the nation’s top 200 law firms and, as the site says, “what they’re doing — or not — in the face of Trump’s attack.”
Firms that cut a deal with Mr. Trump are highlighted in red and include Kirkland & Ellis; Latham & Watkins; Skadden; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Milbank; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; A&O Shearman; and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. Sullivan & Cromwell, which helped broker the Paul Weiss deal with Mr. Trump, is also in red.
Those that sued the White House are in green and include WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, Susman Godfrey and Jenner & Block. More than a dozen firms representing or supporting them in court are also in green. The rest of the top 200 firms were deemed as remaining silent and highlighted in yellow.
Despite its outlets’ humble quarters, Breaking Media is backed by well-heeled investors, including its founder Justin Smith, a co-founder of the news website Semafor, and S. Carter Burden III, son of the late New York councilman, media magnate and philanthropist.
Coverage of the law firms’ capitulation has increased traffic to the site, which draws about 1.5 million readers in a normal month, said John Lerner, Breaking Media’s chief executive, who declined to say exactly how big that spike is. “It’s clear that a lot of lawyers want to push back against these executive orders,” he said.
Elizabeth Williamson is a feature writer for The Times, based in Washington. She has been a journalist for three decades, on three continents.
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