We sat with 350 lawyers as they strategized fighting Trump. Big Law was absent — but Smaller Law is itching to fight.

Business Insider

22-04-2025

It's a staid and stately room, the New York City Bar Association meeting hall in Midtown Manhattan. The century-old walls are trimmed with red velvet and high Corinthian columns, and famous alumni, including Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, look down from their oil portraits.
The hall was far from staid on Monday night, though, as Business Insider sat with 350 New York City lawyers for a program called "Defending Justice."
Instead, there were calls for protests, op-ed writing, and lawsuits.
"We should bring as many lawsuits as we possibly can to stop the administration from doing what it can," urged civil rights lawyer Ilann Maazel, a panelist.
At least two lawyers used the decidedly extra-legal term "five-alarm fire." Some spoke of their plans to attend a May 1 protest and their concerns over having their phones searched at the US border. "If you can go on Signal, I recommend you do," one lawyer told another over a post-panel buffet table.
The unrest in the room had two main causes. The first concerned attacks on judges, including recent threats to their safety and the Department of Justice's flirting with the outright defiance of a court's order.
The second concern was President Trump's executive orders targeting Big Law firms.
The White House has cited national security risks and claims of racism from DEI efforts when it imposed penalties on Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie, and others. Paul Weiss and eight other firms struck a deal, while Perkins and three other firms, all hit with similar orders, have sued and won temporary court orders blocking Trump's EOs from going into effect.
The legal profession is duty-bound to speak out against Trump's attacks on the judiciary and his EOs, the bar's president, Muhammad U. Faridi, told the group.
"Lawyers do not serve the executive — they serve the law," Faridi said, kicking off the evening's program.
"What we are witnessing today is not normal," he added. "And it must not be normalized."
A call for resistance
Monday's program was subtitled "Mobilizing the Legal Profession to Stand Up for the Rule of Law." So we were not surprised when much of the four-hour program focused on resistance.
Throughout the night, the call to resist came with words of anger.
An audience member demanded that the group "expel from this membership all the partners of Paul Weiss." This was gently shot down from the dias by Maazel, who called instead for urging Big Law's capitulators to reconsider.
"It's not too late to change your mind," Maazel said to a round of applause.
Maazel, a partner at the law firm Emery Celli, said the big firms that cut deals with the Trump administration could still push back if Trump tries to move the goalposts. And he urged lawyers in the room, including retired lawyers, to step up and help anyone targeted by the administration.
"There is an inexhaustible need for lawyers right now," he said. "Our phones are ringing off the hook."
Sometimes the call to resist came with an invocation of history.
Vince Warren, executive director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, helps defend Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student arrested by federal immigration authorities for his role in pro-Palestine demonstrations on campus.
As a panelist on Monday night, he drew parallels between the US and authoritarian tendencies of India and Hungary, where lawyers or their clients can be "disappeared."
"We have to envision ourselves as fighting for our own lives," he said.
Some said the obstacles to resisting Trump were significant. A lawyer who retired after a career in banking worried he may have to buy his own legal malpractice insurance policy if he wanted to volunteer. For his whole career, he said, his employers had always dealt with that.
Another raised a similar issue: He no longer had access to pricey legal research tools like Westlaw or Lexis.
Christopher Pioch, a business litigator who moderated one of the panels, said that Big Law firms don't incentivize their younger lawyers to be civically involved. Most have some policies that encourage pro bono, but the focus is generally on billable work.
"Because of how we've quantified everything, you really miss out on participating in organizations like the bar association because there's no benefit to doing so," said Pioch.
Fear and loathing in Big Law
The evening's conversation also touched on the red-hot divide between those Big Law firms that have cut deals with Trump and those who are fighting back.
A few firms — including Paul Weiss, Milbank and A&O Shearman — have agreed to collectively devote $940 million in pro bono time to priorities that dovetail with Trump's interests. Meanwhile, firms that have resisted Trump's demands, like Jenner & Block, Covington & Burling, and WilmerHale, stand head and shoulders above other firms when it comes to volunteering for pro bono projects, one speaker noted.
Panelist Shira A. Scheindlin, a retired US district court judge, earned the biggest applause of the evening by wishing aloud that the law firms that capitulated had not.
"If the law firms had all acted collectively and resisted those clearly unconstitutional orders, I think those orders would've quickly disappeared," the retired judge said of the Big Law divide.
(Scheindlin noted that only Justices Alito and Thomas dissented from the Court's order blocking Venezuelan deportations — and got the night's biggest laugh by urging, "Pray for the good health of the remaining seven justices.")
Other lawyers noted that the rules of ethics can be barriers to collective action. When one lawyer suggested that large law firms agree not to poach clients from competitors singled out by Trump, one member from the audience muttered to her seat-mate, "A client can choose whoever they want."
Pizza delivery death threats
Many in the room described fear around taking action.
Scheindlin said some judges had pizzas sent to their homes by people using the name of Judge Esther Salas's son. Salas is a federal judge whose son and husband were shot dead by a disgruntled litigant who showed up on her doorstep.
Many described the fear among lawyers of losing one's job solely for speaking out.
One participant described a recent protest at Bryant Park where a small group of lawyers wore masks for fear of appearing in an online photo seen by their bosses.
Lawyers who worked for nonprofits mused about the possibility of their organization's tax-deductible status being subject to an audit. Another said his nonprofit moved its archives to a secure location offsite and encouraged other lawyers to think about what would happen if their offices were raided by the FBI.
Still, among the rows and rows of lawyers, some hope broke through the anger and frustration.
There was a good deal of gratitude directed towards the judiciary.
"The attitude in which we're living now is one of fear and intimidation," and yet many judges have been "very brave, very courageous," said Scheindlin, the retired judge.
"Can you imagine if we did not have a judiciary right now?" she asked from the dais. "Every one of these executive orders would be carried out."
Maazel noted three reasons there is "room for hope." One was Harvard University's decision to sue the Trump administration. The second was the Supreme Court's late-night order over the weekend barring further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
The third reason for hope? A recent town hall held by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley in Fort Madison, Iowa.
"So all these folks in Iowa — these are not, you know, Manhattan liberals — they were very upset, not with tariffs, not with inflation, but with a man who was sent to El Salvador without any kind of due process," Maazel said, referring to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadorean national who was deported despite a court order that allowed him to seek legal protection in the US. "And that just gave me the illuminance of hope."