Brad Karp has resigned his role as chairman of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison following the release of emails by the US Department of Justice detailing his ties to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Paul Weiss said on Wednesday that Karp had resigned effective immediately and been succeeded as chairman by star deals lawyer Scott Barshay, chair of the firm’s corporate practice.
Karp, who took over as chairman in 2008, will remain at Paul Weiss, which said he would “continue to focus his full-time attention to client service at the firm”.
“Leading Paul Weiss for the past 18 years has been the honour of my professional life,” Karp said in a statement. “Recent reporting has created a distraction and has placed a focus on me that is not in the best interests of the firm,” he added.
Karp’s relationship with Epstein stretched back more than a decade, with Karp sending an email in July 2015 thanking Epstein for hosting him for an evening he described as “once in a lifetime”. The following year, he asked Epstein if he could help get his son a job on an upcoming Woody Allen film.
Karp’s work for marquee client Apollo Global Management brought him into Epstein’s orbit, Bloomberg Law reported. Paul Weiss had been retained by Apollo’s then chief executive, Leon Black, to negotiate a dispute over fees with Epstein, with the firm saying earlier this week that Paul Weiss and Karp never represented Epstein. Black stepped down from Apollo in 2021 over his ties to Epstein.
Emails released by the DOJ last week showed that Karp had maintained communications with Epstein as recently as 2019, when Karp helped him protect his plea deal on sex trafficking charges against legal attacks in the months before he died in jail, Bloomberg Law reported. In February 2019, they also corresponded about legal representation for billionaire Robert Kraft and former Citigroup president John Havens, who faced charges in relation to a Florida prostitution crackdown.
Karp’s resignation follows criticism of him and Paul Weiss last year over the firm’s decision to cut a deal with President Donald Trump to provide $40m in free legal services in order to rescind a punitive executive order that Karp later told staff could have “destroyed” the firm.
It marks a dramatic fall from grace for the litigator, who has spent his entire 40-year legal career at Paul Weiss and has represented clients including JPMorgan and Bank of America. During his tenure as chairman, Karp has overseen the firm grow from being known mainly for litigation work into a corporate powerhouse that advised on just over $400bn of M&A deals in 2025, putting it in ninth place globally by deal value.
That ascent was fuelled by Barshay, who joined the firm in 2016 from Cravath Swaine & Moore and had long been seen internally as Karp’s likely successor, according to a report by the Financial Times.
Barshay, whose appointment as chairman is effective immediately, commented: “I step into this role with great confidence in Paul Weiss’s continued success. Our strength lies in the talent and dedication of our people and trusted client relationships. Clients come to Paul Weiss because we deliver excellence, and our firm is unified in our commitment to continuing to provide the highest standards of client service.”
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