The chairman of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison issued a statement to the firm’s staff on Sunday defending the controversial deal he struck with the Trump administration last week to avert the consequences of an executive order targeting it.  

Brad Karp told his colleagues the executive order, which restricted Paul Weiss lawyers’ access to government officials and buildings and threatened its clients with the loss of their government contracts, “could have easily destroyed our firm”.

The order was one of several Trump has issued recently targeting law firms that he maintains have supported efforts to unfairly prosecute him or help his opponents, alongside a broader effort by his administration to challenge diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. 

Last Thursday, however, it emerged that Trump had rescinded the 14 March order against Paul Weiss after a White House meeting with Karp that resulted in a deal being struck. 

According to a post on Trump’s social networking site Truth Social, the deal includes the firm giving $40m in pro bono services to support his administration’s initiatives. The Truth Social post also said Paul Weiss would engage experts “to conduct a comprehensive audit of all of its employment practices”, “will not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies” and will take on clients regardless of political affiliation. 

In yesterday’s statement, Karp said the firm had hoped the legal industry would rally to its side, even though that hadn’t happened when earlier executive orders had been issued targeting other law firms, including Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling. 

“We had tried to persuade other firms to come out in public support of Covington and Perkins Coie. And we waited for firms to support us in the wake of the president’s executive order targeting Paul Weiss,” he wrote. “Disappointingly, far from support, we learned that certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.”

Karp added that the firm had been preparing to challenge the executive order in court, something Perkins Coie has done, but “it became clear that, even if we were successful in initially enjoining the executive order in litigation, it would not solve the fundamental problem, which was that clients perceived our firm as being persona non grata with the administration”.

Clients had told the firm they would not be able to stay with it despite wanting to do so, Karp wrote. 

“It was very likely that our firm would not be able to survive a protracted dispute with the administration,” he said. 

Against this background, the firm learned that the administration might be willing to make a deal, and negotiated a resolution in a “matter of days”. 

A core part of the deal, said Karp, was that Paul Weiss would retain its “longstanding commitment to diversity in all of its forms” while also “following the law with respect to our employment practices”.

“I know many of you are uncomfortable that we entered into any sort of resolution at all. That is completely understandable,” Karp wrote to his colleagues, adding that “there was no right answer to the predicament in which we found ourselves”.

Noting the firm already performs more than $130m in pro bono work annually, Karp said the firm had also agreed to commit $10m per year over the next four years in pro bono time in “areas of shared interest” such as countering antisemitism and promoting the fairness of the justice system.

Paul Weiss’s leadership had been guided by its obligation to protect client interests and its fiduciary duty to its more than 2,500 lawyers and staff, Karp wrote. 

“That consideration – the need to ensure, above all, that our firm would survive – weighed extremely heavily on all of us, and especially on me, as the leader of the firm,” he said. 

Karp added: “It is very easy for commentators to judge our actions from the sidelines. But no one in the wider world can appreciate how stressful it is to confront an executive order like this until one is directed at you.”

Among the deal’s critics is Marc Elias, a former Perkins Coie partner and a top lawyer for the Democrats, who wrote on social media platform Bluesky last Thursday that the agreement was “a stain on the firm, every one of its partners, and the entire legal profession”.

Frustrated by the lack of opposition from leadership, associates from dozens of major firms have signed an open letter criticising the administration for its attempts to “bully corporate law firms out of engaging in any representation that challenges the administration’s aims” and calling on their bosses to do the same. More than 1,400 associates have anonymously signed the letter since it was published earlier this month.

On Friday Rachel Cohen, a Chicago-based associate at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom who helped coordinate the open letter, gave her conditional notice to the firm citing law firms’ collective failure to challenge Trump’s attacks on the profession.

The American Bar Association (ABA) has also issued statements condemning criticism of judges by administration officials and accusing Trump of punishing law firms because of whom they represent.

And last week, 18 national and international professional bodies, including the Commonwealth Lawyers Association and the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, issued a joint statement condemning “the recent targeting of legal professionals by the US government”.

The executive order against Paul Weiss cited the firm’s hire of Mark Pomerantz, who was a central figure in an investigation into Trump’s finances while at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and its “discriminatory” DEI practices.

Karp’s email to Paul Weiss staff has been published by David Lat on his blog Original Jurisdiction.