A sweeping New York Times investigation into Paul, Weiss has exposed details of the firm’s deal with the Trump administration that are significantly more troubling than initially understood.
Since becoming the first major law firm to strike a deal with Donald Trump, Paul, Weiss has maintained a consistent message that the agreement changed nothing about how it operates.
Brad Karp personally assured partners that the deal would have “no effect on our work,” a talking point the firm has repeated every month since the agreement was reached.
When the New York Times directly asked whether the firm’s independence had been compromised, a spokeswoman said any such assertion was “completely false.”
The investigation contradicts that position, revealing an internal exchange among partners that has drawn significant attention from observers across the legal industry.
The New York Times report also details that the firm internally considered running management decisions by Stephen Miller, a revelation that cuts against its insistence that nothing changed.
Litigation co-chair Karen Dunn reportedly pushed leadership in the days after the deal to file a lawsuit against the administration over any available matter, specifically to signal the firm retained its independence, though that effort went nowhere.
Buried within the investigation is a previously unreported detail: Paul, Weiss paid its first openly transgender partner $3.5 million as part of a non-disparagement agreement when that partner left the firm.
The firm had previously faced criticism after rolling out an all-white, nearly all-male partner class in 2018, before pivoting to position itself as a diversity leader in the legal industry the following year.
The transgender partner had been elevated ahead of schedule in part, according to the reporting, because the firm needed the reputational benefit that came with the promotion.
When Karp stepped down following revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the partnership elevated Barshay to lead the firm, the same executive who allegedly viewed having a transgender partner as a liability for the client list.
Above the Law had spent well over a year documenting what it described as Paul, Weiss’s transformation from Biglaw’s self-appointed conscience to its most instructive cautionary tale, and the New York Times investigation stitches those threads into a single, damning narrative.
Separately, Texas firm Jackson Walker has agreed to pay $15 million to resolve a US Trustee lawsuit over a former partner’s undisclosed romantic relationship with a bankruptcy judge who was presiding over her cases.