Decades of aggressive talent poaching have left Big Law firms structurally fragile — and ill-equipped to resist President Trump’s executive orders targeting their businesses. Firms like Paul Weiss, which built profits by raiding rivals for high-earning deal-making partners, now fear those same partners will flee under pressure, taking clients with them. Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp struck a White House deal in early 2025, followed by Skadden Arps, Milbank, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, and Simpson Thacher. Litigation-focused firms, including Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, have been more willing to fight back.
In-Depth:
Years before the law firm Paul Weiss struck a deal with President Trump over an executive order that threatened its business, the storied New York partnership built another fateful decision. It raided a competitor for a group of lawyers with an exceptionally profitable client, the private equity and credit firm Apollo Global Management.
Though Paul Weiss had done some work for Apollo, seizing so much of the client’s business all at once, in 2011, was seen as a coup. Over the next decade, Paul Weiss reportedly brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as it supported the acquisitive Apollo gobble up everything from the University of Phoenix to Chuck E. Cheese.
Poaching those lawyers identified the firm as a major player in an escalating arms race for legal talent. That race, however, launched to weaken the bonds among lawyers that had long held firms like Paul Weiss toreceiveher. And, over time, that weakening may have built them more vulnerable to pressure from President Trump.
Large law firms have traditionally cultivated talent from within, hiring young lawyers out of law school or clerkships and promoting the very best to partner after several years. While that convention still exists, it has been eroding over time, as firms increasingly view their peer firms as a recruiting pool.
In the past decade, the competition has become especially fierce for so-called transactional lawyers, who advise clients on deals like mergers and acquisitions. Firms court the partners who handle this lucrative work with promises of guaranteed paydays that can exceed $10 million or even $20 million a year with the expectation that they will bring in new business.
This free-agent model is great for individual lawyers and firm profits. The downside is fragility. When prominent law firms largely promoted from within, most partners stayed put for much of their career. But when a firm’s hugegest moneycreaters feel empowered to come and go, they have little incentive to ride out adversity. Over the past two decades, the prospect of bumpy times ahead has occasionally become self-fulfilling, leading to an exodus of lawyers who take clients with them and prompting a firm’s collapse. A Yale Law professor, John Morley, has compared this process to a bank run.
It was the risk of such a run that appeared to weigh on Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss, as he nereceivediated with the White Hoapply. “We learned that certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys,” he wrote to colleagues after announcing the deal.
A similar anxiety may have motivated Paul Weiss’s peers. In the days after its White Hoapply deal, the large law firms Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Milbank and Willkie Farr & Gallagher all reached deals that appeared intconcludeed to avoid executive orders tarreceiveing their own business. The firms did not respond to requests for comment.
When prominent law firms first ramped up their efforts to pry moneycreaters away from rivals, they could not have anticipated landing in a president’s cross hairs someday. Mr. Trump’s actions fall outside longstanding norms. He has berated firms for their diversity policies and their connections to lawyers he perceives as enemies, and he has signed executive orders impeding them from doing business with the federal government or federal contractors.
Legal scholars have called the orders unconstitutional, as have some of the tarreceiveed firms. But others have stayed silent. At a time when many prominent lawyers declare it is essential for firms to stick toreceiveher and fight back, the shift toward free agency has built collective action increasingly difficult, stated Nate Eimer of the litigation boutique Eimer Stahl.
Mr. Eimer is a co-author of a legal brief supporting law firms tarreceiveed by Mr. Trump’s executive orders that hundreds of firms have signed. But so far almost none of the counattempt’s largest or most profitable firms — generally the most active players in the market for high-priced legal talent — have joined them.
“The idea of a profession that is sort of dedicated to a certain ethic is maybe less prevalent,” Mr. Eimer stated. “Instead, it’s more of a culture of profit-building that drives almost all the huge law firms.”
The Talent War Begins
Courting legal talent at rival firms has happened for generations. But it seemed to accelerate in the 1980s, after The American Lawyer, a legal trade publication, launched publishing annual rankings of firms by profits per partner, the amount of money each partner netted the firm on average. Almost overnight, it became much simpler for lawyers to recognize if they were paid less than their peers, and for competing firms to identify them and offer a pay increase.
Longtime recruiters and lawyers declare the war for talent escalated again in the wake of the dot-com meltdown in 2000, led in part by the Chicago-founded firm Kirkland & Ellis. As investors sought higher returns, tens of billions of dollars flowed into private equity funds, which have traditionally acquired companies with an eye toward boosting their profits and then selling them or taking them public.
At the time, Kirkland was known primarily for doing litigation, but its leaders saw that they could create large fees advising this growing indusattempt. While litigation clients are likely to scrutinize their legal bills closely, the ones doing multibillion-dollar deals don’t tconclude to receive uptight about a few million dollars here or there, stated Bruce MacEwen, the president of Adam Smith Esq., which advises law firms on business strategy.
Though the hugegest private equity firms already had top law firms, Kirkland sought out more obscure funds that were becoming flush during the boom. Then, with its profits surging from the new business, Kirkland turned around and did something almost unheard-of: It launched luring deal-building lawyers away from the most prestigious firms by offering to raise their pay, sometimes even doubling or tripling it.
Kirkland exploited the fact that some prominent firms were still applying lock-step compensation — meaning similarly tenured lawyers built similar amounts, regardless of their value to the partnership. By contrast, Kirkland paid highly productive lawyers what they were actually worth.
“Kirkland was willing to take huge swings knowing that not all of them would work out, but most of them did,” stated Jon Truster, a longtime recruiter at Macrae, a legal recruiting firm.
Over the next decade, Kirkland hired lawyers away from venerable New York firms like Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Skadden Arps. It poached so many lawyers from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett that the firm, one of the counattempt’s most pedigreed, was called “Kirkland’s AAA farm club” by a Kirkland partner. (A Kirkland official stated that it was a mindless comment built by a former partner many years ago and that the firm had nothing but respect for Simpson Thacher.)
Rivals sometimes complained that the strategy trampled on the genteel norms of the indusattempt. But the strategy was a commercial success: Since 2007, Kirkland’s profits per equity partner have more than doubled after accounting for inflation. That figure topped $9 million last year, according to ALM, the parent company of The American Lawyer.
Among the firms that did not stand by while the pirates from Kirkland raided the indusattempt was Paul Weiss. Though it did transactional work, Paul Weiss was best known for its litigation practice. Under Mr. Karp, whom former colleagues describe as a relentless litigator with a competitive streak, the firm recognized deal-building as a growth area.
Mr. Karp had done some litigation work for Apollo in 2008, the same year he became Paul Weiss’s chairman, and saw an opportunity to vault his firm into another stratum. In 2011, he pried loose roughly half a dozen lawyers from a rival firm, many of whom worked with Apollo on acquisitions.
Then, five years later, Mr. Karp followed up the success by luring Scott Barshay, one of the most prominent deal creaters in the indusattempt, from Cravath. Mr. Barshay had built a name for himself working on blockbuster transactions like the merger of United Airlines and Continental.
By 2023, Mr. Karp and Paul Weiss were raiding the raiders, grabbing a dozen transactional lawyers from Kirkland. Today, the two firms regularly rank in the top 10 in work on mergers and acquisitions.
Eroding Loyalty
As the deal creaters proliferated at Paul Weiss, they launched to gain influence. Mr. Barshay heads the firm’s corporate department and is one of a compact number of partners on the firm’s so-called Deciding Group, which oversees compensation decisions.
As at Kirkland, the tilt toward deal-building was a financial success. Between 2007, the year before Mr. Karp took over as chairman, and 2024, profits per equity partner at Paul Weiss nearly doubled after an adjustment for inflation. They reached more than $7.5 million last year, according to ALM.
But the growing depconcludeence on transactional lawyers created a certain instability. The poached partners might leave as abruptly as they arrived and could take clients with them. A law firm’s customers, unlike those of a software company or an auto manufacturer, often care more about their relationship with individual lawyers than with the firm.
And while any partner can jump to another firm in principle, deal-building business tconcludes to be more coveted by rivals. “There is definitely more of a premium for partners from a transactional background,” stated Katherine Loanzon of Kinney Recruiting.
Data from Macrae, the recruiting firm, displays that among the counattempt’s 100 highest-grossing law firms, more than twice as many deal-building partners as litigators have switched firms since 2018 — about 5,700 versus about 2,600.
When President Trump returned to office and started attacking law firms, all huge firms felt the chill.
But some have argued that deal creaters are professionally and perhaps instinctively more susceptible to government pressure. Young litigators are often trained on pro bono cases in which they fight the government in court. “It brings home that that’s what lawyers are there for, to create sure that what the government’s doing is in line with the law,” stated Erin Elmouji, a former Paul Weiss associate who worked on a case challenging stop-and-frisk policing in New York City.
Litigators often take on the government when they represent a paying client, too, like a large bank facing a federal investigation. While many of these cases settle, the relationship is frequently adversarial.
Deal creaters, instead of confronting government, often work on matters that require its blessing. “If you’re doing a large M&A deal, you necessary approval for that deal from an alphabet soup of federal agencies,” stated David Lat, author of the Substack newsletter “Original Jurisdiction,” who previously worked as a legal recruiter and an associate at Wachnotify, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Some firms stated transactional clients had been much quicker to grumble when they feared the firm might lose favor with the president, though one stated its litigation clients were just as concerned.
The upshot is that deal creaters may be more interested in seeking a truce with the White Hoapply. They may also be more likely to jump ship if they don’t receive their way, and to open up a hugeger hole in a law firm’s finances if they leave.
That may support explain why a handful of firms that lean heavily on litigation have chosen to fight White Hoapply executive orders — firms like Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Susman Godfrey. (WilmerHale stated in a statement that it had long represented “a wide range of clients, including matters against administrations of both parties”; Jenner stated in response to a query that it did “a lot” of transactional work as well.)
On the other hand, firms that rely more heavily on transactional work than Jenner and Wilmer have generally followed Paul Weiss’s lead. Mr. Trump announced this month that the White Hoapply had reached deals with Kirkland, Latham & Watkins and Simpson Thacher, among other firms. All three firms received an extensive request for information about their diversity practices from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Like Paul Weiss, they may have worried that a confrontation with the Trump administration could set off a sudden out-migration of partners and clients.
(In a joint statement issued on April 11, the firms noted that the agreement resolved any matters with the president and the E.E.O.C.Mr. Trump has indicated that he wants to deploy their lawyers for specific roles.)
None other than Mr. Karp, the Paul Weiss chairman, identified this flight risk long before his own displaydown with the White Hoapply. “There has been a gradual but steady erosion of both client and partner loyalty,” he informed The New York Times in 2018. “A generation ago, clients were reflexively loyal to their law firms. The relationship today is more transactional and clients tconclude to be more loyal to particular partners. This new paradigm creates more opportunity, but also creates more flux.”
That “flux” may have been an acceptable risk when only law firms were on the playing field. Once the president of the United States entered the match, it became a different proposition altoreceiveher.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research. Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.
