Trump Law Firm Attacks Add Pain, Even on Shaky Legal Ground (1)

Perkins Coie risks losing clients over President Donald Trump’s threat to terminate federal contracts for companies doing business with the law firm.

Boeing Co., T-Mobile USA Inc., and Microsoft Corp. are among Perkins Coie clients with extensive federal contracts. The firm last year represented Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. and KBR Services LLC when competitors challenged those companies’ contracts with the military, according to Government Accountability Office dockets.

Trump signed an executive order last week requiring those companies and other Perkins Coie clients to disclose their ties to the firm. The order also authorizes federal agencies to tear up contracts with the companies. “When you are inhibiting a firm’s ability to advise their clients, it’s going to have a significant impact,” Cari Brunelle, co-founder of legal industry advisory firm Baretz + Brunelle, said.

Perkins Coie plans to challenge the “patently unlawful” order, the firm said in a March 6 statement. Perkins Coie hired Williams & Connolly to represent it, the New York Times reported Monday, citing four unnamed people briefed on the matter. Perkins Coie declined to comment to Bloomberg Law and Williams & Connolly didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump said he issued the order, which also suspends Perkins Coie’s security clearances and bars the firm’s personnel from entering federal buildings, because the firm was involved in “weaponization against a political opponent’’ during the 2016 presidential campaign. Perkins Coie lawyers advised Hillary Clinton and retained Washington firm Fusion GPS for research that resulted in the so-called Steele dossier, which alleged Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russian government officials.

The move marked Trump’s second direct attack on a Big Law firm in slightly more than a week. The president signed a memo Feb. 25 directing agencies to suspend security clearances for Covington & Burling employees who assisted Jack Smith, a former prosecutor who brought two criminal cases against Trump. Covington & Burling didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Perkins Coie order requires “government contractors to disclose any business they do” with the law firm and authorizes federal agencies to terminate any contract “for which Perkins Coie has been hired to perform any service.” The order is subject to existing law.

The order is “clearly very punitive” for Perkins Coie, said Walter Olson, a fellow at the Cato Institute. “If they are a pariah status, it will very likely be a weaker sector of lawyers handling government contracts, which is what many people in the administration want.”

The law firms will suffer from the president’s actions more than any of their clients, said Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at NYU Law School. “The client can go to another law firm,” Gillers said, “but the law firm is now excluded. It’s a multiplier effect for the firm.”

‘Blackball’ Effort

Perkins Coie will have a strong case against the “arbitrary and capricious” directive, said Bruce Green, a legal ethics professor at Fordham Law School.

“This violates those parties’ right to legal assistance from lawyers of their choosing as well as to a fair opportunity to contract with the government,” Green said. The order also violates the firm’s due process rights, according to Green.

Larry Lorber, an attorney at Seyfarth Shaw, said the call for contractors to disclose work with the law firm also raises issues about attorney-client privilege. There is no legal authority for contractors to disclose work with Perkins Coie, and the order alone doesn’t establish one, said Lorber, a former director of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.

Still, the orders can inflict damage. James Nagle, a lawyer Smith, Currie & Hancock, said he’d advise clients seeking representation outside his firm to steer clear of Perkins Coie until the dust settles.

Firms are analyzing new matters from clients for potentially explosive political ramifications, according to Brunelle.

“Many law firms are instituting new procedures for examining new matters and looking at them through a new lens,” she said. “Is there any potential risk for taking on this new matter or taking on a new client?”

The order appears to be “trying to blackball” Perkins Coie, said David Lopez, a Rutgers Law School professor and former general counsel at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The order reads like “anti-DEI theater” mixed with a “specific political payback,” he said.

The New York City Bar Association issued a statement Feb. 27 that “denounces in the strongest possible terms” the president’s order against Covington. The order is intended to discourage firms from representing clients whose interests are not aligned with the administration, the group said.

“While the order purports to investigate and combat the weaponization of the judicial process, the irony is that it makes a mockery of that same process,” said the association, which declined a request for further comment.

— With reporting by Isabel Gottlieb