Some lawyers split with their firms over response to Trump's attacks

By Sara Merken

April 9 (Reuters) - As most major law firms stay silent on U.S. President Donald Trump's executive orders targeting the legal industry, some of the firms' lawyers are pushing back on their own.

More than 330 partners from the largest U.S. firms by revenue joined an online effort this week to organize potential court filings and internal discussions at their firms, which are facing a stark choice between resisting Trump or seeking peace with the administration.

Separately, Joseph Baio, a senior lawyer at Willkie Farr, resigned from the firm after it struck a deal with Trump to avoid an executive order that could have crippled its business, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Andrew Silberstein, who was an associate at Willkie Farr, confirmed to Reuters that he also resigned because of the firm's agreement.

An email response from Baio's Willkie address said he has left the firm. He did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Willkie Farr did not respond to a request for comment.

Neel Chatterjee, a partner at Goodwin Procter who organized the online partner group, said in a Sunday LinkedIn post launching the effort that many partners disagreed with their employers' decisions not to back other firms hit with punishing executive orders.

It was a "hard day," he wrote, when neither Goodwin nor his former firm signed onto a Friday court brief supporting Perkins Coie, one of the firms targeted by Trump.

He told Reuters that the group may file friend-of-the-court briefs on its own.

Goodwin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

More than 500 law firms signed Friday's brief denouncing Trump's targeting of Perkins Coie and other firms, expressing alarm over the Republican president's crackdown on the legal profession. Most of the largest U.S. firms did not sign the brief, however.

That reticence "doesn't mean there weren't many partners within those firms that wished for a different result," said Haley Morrison, a Portland, Oregon-based partner at law firm Epstein Becker Green who is part of the online group. Her firm had no immediate comment.

Trump to date has signed executive orders targeting five firms, including orders that restricted their lawyers' access to government officials and threatened to cancel federal contracts held by their clients. He has also directed officials to probe more firms over their internal diversity policies and their involvement in lawsuits against the federal government.

Three of the firms hit with executive orders - Perkins Coie, WilmerHale and Jenner & Block - sued Trump in response, asserting that the orders violate the U.S. Constitution and winning rulings that have temporarily blocked them. Another firm hit with one of Trump's orders, Paul Weiss, reached a deal with the president that led to the directive being rescinded.

Three other firms – Milbank, Willkie Farr & Gallagher and Skadden Arps – reached deals with Trump without being hit with an order against them, agreeing to provide free legal work to causes the president supports.

Trump has said more firms are seeking similar deals. "They're all lining up," he said at a White House event on Monday.

Doug Emhoff, the husband of former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump's 2024 election opponent, had told Willkie Farr's leadership that he disagreed with a decision to seek a deal with the Trump administration and said they should fight back, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Emhoff, who joined the firm after the election, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At least two associates at Skadden have quit the firm since it reached its agreement with Trump. Another who resigned from Skadden days before the agreement, Rachel Cohen, criticized the deals in testimony before an informal hearing of Congressional Democrats on Monday.

Groups of lawyers that previously worked at Skadden and Paul Weiss separately sent letters to their former employers criticizing the deals. Paul Weiss, Skadden and Milbank did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The agreements raise "the troubling prospect" that the Republican president unlawfully coerced the firms to allocate millions of dollars "to support his pet issues, making statements that support his agenda, and reversing firm policies he disagrees with," U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, both Democrats, wrote in letters this week to the four firms that have struck deals.