The erasure was quiet but deliberate: Paul, Weiss removed dozens of articles, press releases, and an entire pro bono page from its website after reaching an accommodation with the Trump administration.
That page had explicitly promised the firm would “remain steadfast in our commitment” to election-related pro bono work, language that now exists only in cached memories and screenshots.
The firm had previously promoted its involvement in a landmark 1965 voting rights case, a piece of institutional history that also disappeared from public view alongside its more recent work.
The scrubbing of that record may be the starkest symbol of a broader retreat by major law firms from the frontlines of election law heading into the 2026 midterms.
Firms that struck agreements with the Trump administration are conspicuously absent from the legal fights now heating up around the midterm elections, leaving a significant gap in resources and firepower.
The damage, however, extends beyond those that formally cut deals, with several top 100 firms that never reached any accommodation now quietly avoiding politically sensitive cases for fear of becoming a future target.
At the centre of the void stands Norm Eisen, the former White House ethics czar who now runs the Democracy Defenders Fund and has spent years assembling a coalition to counter Trump legally.
For the better part of a decade, Eisen’s opening move in any major legal confrontation with the Trump administration was a call to Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul, Weiss, whose firm brought substantial resources to that fight.
Eisen has since built a network spanning pro-democracy groups, legal nonprofits, public interest organisations, and the handful of large firms such as WilmerHale that chose to contest executive orders rather than negotiate around them.
Yet even that carefully constructed alliance cannot fully substitute for what Paul, Weiss once represented, and Eisen has said so plainly. “I miss Brad,” he said, in what amounts to one of the more candid admissions of the current moment in election law.
The remark underscores how much the calculus of legal resistance has shifted since major Biglaw firms began trading pro bono commitments for relief from government pressure.
Meanwhile, the Class of 2026 is confronting its own professional reckoning, having posted poor bar exam results on the traditional version of the test, removing the new format as any possible explanation for the outcome.