Whenever Norm Eisen, a leader of the legal resistance against President Trump, wanted to try to hold Mr. Trump accountable over the last decade, one of his first calls was to Brad Karp, the chairman of the white shoe law firm Paul Weiss.
Without hesitation, Mr. Karp would give Mr. Eisen free legal counsel on how to best oppose Mr. Trump, and would then deploy the firm’s vast legal muscle — at no cost — to help.
“He was one of the greatest champions of voting and civil rights — and for democracy — in the country, and to have someone like that advising you, resourcing you and fighting for you was indispensable,” Mr. Eisen said.
Now, as Mr. Eisen prepares to lead a coalition that has vowed to stop Mr. Trump if he tries to interfere in the midterm elections, Paul Weiss, one of nine firms to strike deals with the administration to avoid crippling executive orders, is largely on the sidelines, according to Mr. Eisen and a lawyer with direct knowledge of the matter.
The void left by Paul Weiss is only a sliver of the impact of the deals the nine firms made with Mr. Trump early in his second term. In exchange, they pledged to do nearly a billion dollars in free legal work to causes Mr. Trump champions, casting doubt on whether they would be willing to stand up to the president.
Measuring the consequences of the deals is difficult, but the lead-up to the midterm elections offers new clues. Few of the nine firms are publicly involved in the major legal efforts to check Mr. Trump and his administration’s attempts to meddle, a review of public documents and interviews with democracy advocates, election lawyers and voting rights litigators shows.
The absence of the firms has raised serious worries about whether the legal profession is equipped to respond to the administration, which has already begun to file litigation intended to sow confusion about the outcome of the election. But lawyers like Mr. Eisen say that they are just as prepared and point to a string of recent court victories as evidence of their prowess.
Some of the firms have scrubbed their websites of their storied histories working on voting rights cases. At one firm that made a deal with Mr. Trump, several lawyers are quietly volunteering to help voting rights causes, hoping that their bosses do not find out, according to a lawyer at one of the firms who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The chilling effect, the interviews show, has extended to several of the top 100 firms in the United States that did not cut deals with Mr. Trump. Fearing being targeted, they have also avoided politically sensitive cases, according to interviews.
So many of them — including ones that have made deals with Mr. Trump and those that have not — have declined to help one longtime civil rights group, the Advancement Project, that it has started an internal tracker to stay on top of all the firms declining to team up on cases.
“I’ve been told, ‘We don’t do civil rights work involving the administration anymore,’ and, ‘We don’t do voting rights work anymore,’’’ said John Powers, the legal director at the Advancement Project, which often litigates voting rights cases by joining with better-financed private firms.
Most recently, when the Advancement Project filed suit with the N.A.A.C.P. against aspects of the Justice Department’s election-monitoring plans this fall, it had to set out on its own without a private partner. (On Friday, Mr. Powers said that it had received a new offer of help.)
“It’s been a sea change,” Mr. Powers said.
In some cases, Mr. Powers added, partners at firms working with the Advancement Project pulled back their support, dropped out entirely or agreed only to help on the condition that they not be named publicly.
“All too often we’re having to find workarounds because we don’t have the support,” he said.
Mr. Powers would not name the firms because he was hoping the private support would return in the future, he said.
“The pendulum is going to swing,” he predicted.
Law firms have played a key role since the civil rights movement in checking the federal government, even though suing the government over voting and civil rights cases typically pays far less compared with representing corporations. But the chance to work on those issues pro bono became a persuasive recruiting tool for firms. It served as evidence that incoming associates could not only make a lot of money assisting companies and wealthy people, but also do good.
During elections in recent decades, associates and partners have volunteered to be stationed in swing states where they could quickly initiate legal challenges on Election Day or if there was a contested counting of the results. Firms have pledged to represent poll workers while also bringing complex legal challenges against states encroaching on voting rights.
Paul Weiss repeatedly promoted its role in a landmark 1965 voting rights case. Dozens of articles and news releases on its website laid out its work during the Trump era on voting rights and election law.
“We remain steadfast in our commitment, supporting recent voting rights actions in several courts nationally as counsel of record,” the firm wrote on its website on a page dedicated to its pro bono election rights work.
But some time after Paul Weiss, which donated more money to Democrats in 2024 than any other firm, struck the deal with Mr. Trump in March 2025, the page for voting rights was taken down, along with 30 other pages related to its work on the subject.
A search of the firm’s website for the words “voting” and “voting rights” returns just two results.
Paul Weiss and seven other firms did not respond to questions asking for examples of voting rights cases or other matters the firm is working on in opposing the administration. (One of the firms that made a deal with Mr. Trump — Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft — merged with another firm.)
Mr. Trump’s norm-breaking use of power during his first term, like child separation at the border, led many firms to use their pro bono hours to oppose the administration. His attempts to interfere with the 2020 election only established more fodder.
But the postures of the firms changed during Mr. Trump’s second term.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, firms deployed their resources to oppose Mr. Trump because they faced no cost for doing so, financially or politically.
But now firms see those cases as liabilities for their profits.
In their place, lawyers like Mr. Eisen have helped establish a network of lawyers across the country. It includes pro-democracy groups, legal nonprofits, public interest law firms and a few of the most high-profile firms, like WilmerHale, that fought back when Mr. Trump targeted them with executive orders.
Mr. Eisen, who leads the Democracy Defenders Fund, said that while the group of lawyers may be different, the quality of the legal work remains. He added that he had more than enough lawyers to counter Mr. Trump in court.
“We have not seen a single time in the past 20 months in which I did not have the resources,” he said. “The muscle is still there.”
Even if Paul Weiss or any of the firms that made deals with Mr. Trump wanted to help, Mr. Eisen said, he and his clients would not trust that they would zealously represent them, given the leverage Mr. Trump continues to hold.
At the same time, Mr. Eisen acknowledged, the attempts to hold Mr. Trump accountable could use Mr. Karp, his expertise and the army of lawyers he used to deploy.
“I miss Brad,” he said.
Aric Toler contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière and Seamus Hughes contributed research.
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