In Godfather Part 2 the movie opens with singer Johnny Fontane seeking Vito Corleone’s help to obtain a movie role. Vito responded he would give the reluctant studio head “an offer he can’t refuse.” The offer was: either accept Johnny for the movie or accept the message left by a severed horse’s head placed in the sleeping studio head’s bed.
President Trump has said the Godfather movies are among his top movie picks.
Perhaps it was just such an inspiration that led the President in March 2025 to make an offer even Washington DC’s wealthiest law firm, Paul Weiss LLC, couldn’t refuse. A vital part of the firm’s profit comes from its transactional lawyers who arrange mergers and acquisitions requiring government approvals.
The firm though had offended the President by representing Hillary Clinton and also clients who had sued the first Trump administration. Another firm attorney, Mark Pomerantz, had taken a leave of absence to assist the Manhattan DA investigate Mr. Trump’s finances.
So, the President on March 14, 2025, issued an Executive Order to deny access of Paul Weiss’s attorneys to any federal building anywhere, to begin the process of terminating for convenience government contracts of the firm’s clients, and to revoke the attorneys’ security clearances. The President’s offer was he would rescind the Executive Order if the firm agreed to spend $40 million dollars in pro bono work supporting administration pet projects, and to reverse firm hiring policies the President disagreed with.
The Chairman of Paul Weiss, Brad Karp, called the Executive Order an “unprecedented threat …unlike anything since Samuel Weiss first hung out a shingle in downtown Manhattan on April 1, 1875—almost 150 years ago.” Karp explained in a letter to the firm he had to accept the President’s offer because: “…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 clients perceived our firm as being persona non grata with the administration.”
In other words, a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO), could not save the firm because within days the firm could expect to watch its lucrative transaction clients who need government approvals and their attorneys to walk out the door to competing law firms not suing the government. Karp wrote resistance would mean the firm would be “destroyed.” A Yale Law professor, John Morley, likened the Executive Order to starting a bank run on the firm.
Of course, the problem for anyone making a devil’s bargain is that the devil is never going to be through with you. In announcing the settlement, the President described Paul Weiss’s commitments in terms broader than the agreement itself. He also claimed Chairman Karp had “acknowledged the wrongdoing of former Paul Weiss partner Mark Pomerantz” – a false assertion nowhere in the parties’ actual agreement.
In all, the President pressured 13 firms with similar threats; nine have now settled. However, four firms refused to bend the knee, and sued the government alleging the Executive Orders are unconstitutional: Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey and Wilmer Hale. What those firms have in common is that they are all less dependent on transactional work requiring government approvals. They are more focused on litigation which had often put them on the other side of the government anyway.
And all is not lost even for the Paul Weiss firm. Coercion and duress remain valid defenses to enforcement of a settlement contract. Further, three DC US District Judges now have held that the President’s Executive Orders against the resisting firms are unlawful and unconstitutional under the first (speech) and sixth (right to counsel) amendments.
On May 2 U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell in Washington struck down the Executive Order against Perkins Coie, writing the unconstitutional Order “draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” For “eliminating lawyers as the guardians of the rule of law removes a major impediment to the path to more power.’”
Separately another DC District Judge, John Bates, on May 23 voided the Executive Order against Jenner & Block, stating: “retaliating against firms for the views embodied in their legal work…violates the First Amendment’s central command that ‘government may not ‘use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.’”
Most recently, on May 27, District Judge Richard Leon issued an Opinion finding the Order against Wilmer Hale unconstitutional. He starts with an exclamation: “The cornerstone of the American system of justice is an independent judiciary and an independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting. The Founding Fathers knew this!”
More and more we can look only to the Courts, guided by the Constitution, to fulfill the solemn duty “to make no peace with injustice in this world.”
Robert P. Wise is a Northsider.
