American Bar Association adopts resolution against Trump's law firm crackdown

By Karen Sloan and Mike Scarcella

Aug 11 (Reuters) - The American Bar Association’s policymaking body on Monday adopted a resolution opposing government efforts to punish “lawyers, law firms, or other organizations for representing or having represented any particular client or cause disfavored by the government.”

The resolution is the latest in an escalating conflict between the Trump administration and the ABA, which is the nation’s largest voluntary lawyer organization with about 170,000 dues-paying members. In recent months, the ABA has publicly clashed with the administration over officials’ attacks on judges and law firms, while government officials have dismissed the ABA as a “snooty” organization of “leftist lawyers” and alleged that some of its diversity efforts are illegal.

The U.S. Department of Justice has barred its attorneys from participating in ABA events and curtailed the organization’s ability to vet new federal judicial nominations. Trump in April threatened to revoke the ABA’s status as the federally recognized accreditor of law schools.

The rule of law “will not long survive if lawyers and law firms are threatened and punished for doing their jobs and if judges are threatened with punishment for doing their jobs,” the ABA's new resolution said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the resolution.

The ABA has brought multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration, including a pending case filed in July that seeks an order barring the White House from pursuing what the ABA called a campaign of intimidation against major law firms.

The ABA said Trump's actions, including executive orders targeting specific firms, have chilled the ability of some public-interest organizations to find lawyers for new matters. Reuters in a special report last month described how some firms were retreating from public interest legal work in the wake of Trump's pressure campaign.

The Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge in Washington D.C., to dismiss the ABA's case, arguing that there's no certainty that Trump will target the business operations of another firm, and that the claims could only be brought by individual plaintiffs, and not the "monolithic" ABA. The DOJ also said the ABA hadn't shown Trump's actions had dissuaded lawyers from taking certain cases.

The ABA’s House of Delegates is meeting Monday and Tuesday in Toronto to consider a slew of resolutions, many of which relate to the federal government and the rule of law. The resolution opposing attacks on lawyers and law firms also opposes threats to impeach judges “based solely on disagreement with the merits of the rulings made by those judges.”

Since returning to the White House, Trump has issued a series of executive orders targeting law firms over their past clients and lawyers they hired. Nine law firms have struck deals with the president, pledging nearly $1 billion in free legal services on mutually agreed legal issues with the White House in order to stave off similar executive orders.

Four law firms successfully sued the administration to block the orders against them, which stripped their lawyers of security clearances and restricted their access to government officials and federal contracting work.

Read more:

How Trump’s crackdown on law firms is undermining legal defenses for the vulnerable

What Republican, Democratic judges said about Trump’s law firm orders

ABA ramps up defense of judges as White House dismisses 'snooty' lawyers

American Bar Association sues to block Trump's attacks on law firms