In Trump's Washington, ‘You Don't Leave Home Without Your Lawyer'
For the roughly 80,000 lawyers in Washington and its environs, this is the worst of times and the best of times.
Worst because President Trump's threats have prompted some of the nation's biggest firms to capitulate and pledge a collective $1 billion in free legal work for the White House.
But it is best, at least in the volume of work, for the firms handling some of the astounding number of lawsuits — more than 400, according to a New York Times tracker — that have been filed against Trump's administration since the start of his second term. Some of those cases are in other states, but most are being fought in the nation's capital.
'This is a good time to be a lawyer in Washington,' said Gregory B. Craig, who was a White House counsel to former President Barack Obama. 'Good lawyers, like other humans, want to be wanted. And these days in Trump's world, whether you're an immigration lawyer or a university president or the head of an independent agency, you don't leave home without your lawyer.'
Craig, who worked for more than four decades for two big-name firms, Williams & Connolly and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, retired in 2019 after his acquittal on a charge of lying to the Justice Department. He came out of retirement last week to work in the Washington office of Foley Hoag, a firm based in Boston.
Donald B. Verrilli Jr., a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson who was solicitor general under Obama, agreed that this was an extraordinary moment to be a Washington lawyer, but he sounded less chipper about it. Verrilli was the author of a brief supporting Perkins Coie, the first law firm targeted by Trump. Ultimately, 500 firms, mostly boutique and medium-sized, signed the brief, but only eight of them were among the nation's top 100 firms.
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