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Showing Original Post only (View all)The American Bar Association Is Suing Over Trump's Extortion Of Law Firms [View all]
Source: Huff Post
Jun 16, 2025, 03:10 PM EDT
The American Bar Association, the largest national group representing lawyers, sued in federal court to permanently stop President Donald Trump’s extortion of law firms on Monday. Soon after taking office for his second term, Trump issued a series of executive orders targeting seven law firms with punitive sanctions for political reasons. The orders acted as an opening salvo in an attack on Big Law to pressure law firms into “deals” with the administration that would restrain them from challenging Trump’s policies.
After Trump hit the venerable New York firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison with an executive order on March 14 banning its lawyers from contact with the federal government and access to federal buildings, and stripping its lawyers of security clearances, which would have effectively ended its ability to work, the firm’s partners agreed to an informal deal to make the order go away. The firm pledged $40 million in pro bono services to the administration and to end Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices. It also removed nearly all mention of its pro bono work challenging the immigration policies of the first Trump administration from its web site.
In the following weeks, eight law firms entered into preemptive deals with the administration to avoid the threat of a punitive order by pledging a total of $900 million in pro bono services. A chill settled over Big Law as the firms that entered into these deals, and others fearful of being targeted, curtailed or halted their pro bono work on causes that might anger Trump, in particular providing services to immigrants and immigrant rights groups.
Trump’s extortion of law firms via executive order “is unlawful,” the ABA lawsuit states. “Our Constitution does not vest the Executive Branch with the power to point to individual lawyers or law firms, declare by executive fiat that their work or their internal policies are ‘against the national interest’ or otherwise illegal or improper, and direct (or threaten) executive action against that lawyer or law firm.”
Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/aba-trump-law-firms_n_68506313e4b0534654df30d2?origin=top-ad-recirc
Link to LAWSUIT (PDF) - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.281674/gov.uscourts.dcd.281674.1.0.pdf
