President Trump has rescinded an executive order he issued last week imposing sanctions on the mega-law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. In return for Trump pulling the executive order, which, according to reports, was beginning to see an exodus of clients from the firm, Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp bowed to Trump's demands. At a White House meeting that resembled VJ Day on the deck of the USS Missouri, Mr. Karp agreed the firm would cease all DEI-based personnel actions, affirmed it would represent clients regardless of their politics, and agreed to allocate $40 million in pro bono hours "assisting our Nation’s veterans, fairness in the Justice System, the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and other mutually agreed projects."

In addition to those concessions, Mr. Karp "acknowledged 'wrongdoing' by one of the firm’s former partners, Mark F. Pomerantz. Mr. Pomerantz had tried to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump several years ago while working at the Manhattan district attorney’s office." 

Another firm targeted by Trump, Perkins Coie, has taken the opposite tack. Perkins Coie has acknowledged the executive order “truly is life-threatening. It will spell the end of the law firm.” Yet, for the sake of being bold and valiant resistance, fighters went to court and succeeded in getting a temporary restraining order by a judge who declared that Trump's executive order was "likely unconstitutional." Presumably, if your law firm is large enough, the Constitution demands the federal government give you business, award security clearances to your staff, maintain a sensitive compartmented information facility in your offices at government expense, and give your staff unfettered access to federal buildings. Who knew?

This will be remembered as one of the most costly legal victories in history. Just because a random judge made a ruling does not take away from the fact that the entire executive branch and the business community know Perkins Coie is anathema. If clients with business or even potential business before the federal government were bailing after the executive order, they will be fleeing in droves now that Perkins Coie is in a full-fledged faceoff with a president who is unlikely to let bygones be bygones. Ultimately, money talks and bull-puckey walks. Most of Perkins Coie's business is not political.

Perkins Coie employs a bipartisan mix of lawyers. It notes in its lawsuit that Trump nominated two of its partners to be judges in 2019. Political law is the smallest of Perkins Coie’s nine practice groups, consisting of only eight lawyers and accounting for 0.5 percent of its revenue. The rest of the firm, consisting of 1,200 lawyers across 21 offices globally, regularly interacts with more than 90 federal agencies, such as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

And careers are in jeopardy, making it difficult for Perkins Coie to maintain this line and retain quality staff. If they continue the fight, the odds of anyone working for Perkins Coie getting a judgeship in the next four years are zero.

The line Trump has drawn is pretty clear. A law firm can do whatever it wants, but it can't expect to engage in lawfare, practice racial discrimination, select its clients based on their politics, harbor rogue political actors on its staff, and still have business with the federal government.