Big Law firms with ties to President-elect Donald Trump are positioning themselves to influence policy while those heavily tilted toward Democrats retool.
One notable player, Squire Patton Boggs, counts former Trump international economic adviser Everett Eissenstat and former defense secretary Mark Esper among recent hires. Partner Ed Newberry said he and Trump’s incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles exchanged texts just before the election.
“I would expect that I would work closely with her in the administration, particularly where we have clients supporting the administration’s objectives,” said Newberry, whom Wiles hired as a lobbyist decades ago when she worked for the Jacksonville, Florida mayor.
Holland & Knight’s Trump connections include one of its lobbyists, former US Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who said he turned down an invitation to join the president-elect’s transition team because he’s a registered lobbyist but keeps in close contact with its members.
“At other firms, it was like a hate crime to donate to Trump—they’re having to reorient,” Davis said. “Now they are out there trying to recruit Republicans.”
The swagger about Trump connections and the potential revenue they help bring in is a result of his Republican Party taking control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. It’s a shift from four years ago. Then, firms including Morgan Lewis & Bockius and Seyfarth Shaw distanced themselves from a president who had contested the election and galvanized supporters the day many of them stormed the Capitol.
Foley & Lardner after the 2020 election issued a statement saying it was “concerned” that then-partner Cleta Mitchell was with Trump on the call when he asked Georgia officials to find the necessary votes to flip the state in his favor. Mitchell resigned from the firm days later.
Jones Day, which advised Trump on his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, said last year it wasn’t assisting him in his bid to return to the White House. However, the firm represented the Republican National Committee this year in litigation over ballot counting in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Pitching Clients
With Trump about to return to office, firms with connections can tout them as a marketing tool to pitch services to clients, said Jeff Hauser, executive director of Revolving Door Project, a group created to scrutinize executive branch appointees.
“Big law firms like to be bipartisan,” though that can be difficult for some of them, he said. “Sometimes you’ll see multiple law firms on a specific case and the Democratic-aligned law firm might partner up with a law firm better connected to Trump’s America.”
Lawyers financially backed the Democratic presidential candidate and Democratic National Committee over the Republican counterparts by 3-to-1 in 2012, nearly 18-to-1 in 2016, nearly 6-to-1 in 2020, and by more than 5-to-1 as of Sept. 18, a Bloomberg Law analysis found.
At Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, where Vice President Kamala Harris campaign adviser Karen Dunn works, individuals donated $1.59 million to Democratic candidates at the federal level in the 2024 campaign cycle, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political donations. For Republicans, individuals at the firm donated $218,773, according to the group.
A representative for Paul Weiss declined to comment for this story.
At Covington & Burling, professional home to former Attorney General Eric Holder and Harris campaign lawyer Dana Remus, $1.41 million in individual and political action committee donations went to support Democrats, compared to $219,640 for Republicans.
A representative for Covington said the firm declined to comment for this story. But in an interview Dec. 2, Daniel Feldman, who co-chairs Covington’s public policy group, said bipartisanship has always been a value of the firm’s policy advisers.
“We have to have good and deep ties across the political spectrum,” Feldman said. “It’s been a hallmark of our policy practice since its founding.”
Touting Connections
Washington-DC headquartered Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld counts among its roster of former government officials Kelly Cleary, former deputy general counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services under Trump; Clete Willems, Trump’s deputy assistant for international economics and deputy director for the National Economic Council; and former US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., the first Latina to serve in Congress.
Ros-Lehtinen is close to Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick to run the state department. He served as an intern in Ros-Lehtinen’s congressional office, said G. Hunter Bates, co-chair of the firm’s lobbying and public policy practice.
“We have ties with the Trump team and we feel those ties will be important for helping clients navigate the next four years,” Bates said.
Holland & Knight’s founding more than 100 years ago in Florida, and its headquarters in Miami, position it to connect with a Trump team that views the Sunshine State as its home base, said Rich Gold, who leads the firm’s public policy and regulation group.
“We know a lot of the folks from the time they were starting out in their political careers,” Gold said. “The pipeline for lawmakers starts at the local city council level and moves up through state legislature to Congress.”
Gold said he anticipates Holland & Knight will be active on the issues of government streamlining and federal budget talks. “We are going to be very busy,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story:
To contact the editors responsible for this story: