Law Firm That Caved To Trump Is Ripped By Descendants Of Firm’s Patriarch | EUROtoday

One of the powerhouse regulation corporations that caved to President Donald Trump and agreed to supply him with hundreds of thousands in professional bono authorized providers to keep away from an govt order concentrating on it has been admonished by the household of one of many agency’s late companions who accuse it of cowering and caving to Trump.

“We were utterly stunned,” two granddaughters of the late Judge Simon Rifkind, who was a reputation companion with the worldwide agency Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, wrote of their response in a letter to the agency’s chairman, in keeping with a duplicate obtained by The New York Times.

“You traveled to Washington to surrender before you had even begun to fight,” Amy and Nina Rifkind, who’re each practising attorneys, wrote to Brad Karp in a letter dated March 27.

The almost 150-year-old regulation agency, colloquially often called Paul Weiss, agreed to $40 million in free authorized providers to keep away from being federally blackballed partly as a result of one of many agency’s former attorneys overseeing an investigation into Trump’s funds earlier than he grew to become president.

Trump’s govt order was one in every of a number of he signed in opposition to giant regulation corporations whose attorneys have been concerned in work that he has disagreed with.

Three different corporations — Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and Milbank — have additionally every pledged $100 million in free authorized work to Trump to keep away from authorized retaliation. Some of Trump’s different focused regulation corporations have vowed to struggle his challenges.

In their letter, Amy and Nina Rifkind stated that their grandfather by no means would have rolled over to Trump’s menace with out a struggle. They additionally harassed that “when the country hovers between a new authoritarianism and its longstanding freedoms, that what is good for the nation and rule of law is good for Paul, Weiss, not the other way around.”

“We are confident that neither our grandfather, nor his colleagues with whom he built Paul, Weiss, would have negotiated a truce for themselves when the rest of the legal professional remains under threat for doing its jobs as lawyers,” they wrote.

Going ahead, the ladies requested that Karp cease “invoking our grandfather’s name to justify your actions” and that he “support publicly the law firms that are opposing governmental attacks for the clients they advise and the attorneys they hire and to defend the erosion of the rule of law in the courts.”

More than 140 former Paul Weiss associates and staffers additionally signed a public letter final month that protested the agency’s “craven surrender” to Trump.

“We expected the firm to be a leader in standing up for the legal profession, the adversary system, and the right to counsel,” the letter learn. “Instead of a ringing defense of the values of democracy, we witnessed a craven surrender to, and thus complicity in, what is perhaps the gravest threat to the independence of the legal profession since at least the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy.”

Karp expressed gratitude to Trump in a press release issued by the White House after the manager order was dropped in opposition to the agency.

“We are gratified that the President has agreed to withdraw the Executive Order concerning Paul, Weiss. We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration,” he stated.