Paul Weiss Strategy Tested as Partners Exit Post-Trump Deal (1)

Paul Weiss leader Brad Karp spent more than a decade building his firm’s deals practice to an elite level matching its litigation work. A deal he struck with President Donald Trump threatens the balance between the two.

The Wall Street firm lost a string of litigation partners following the March 20 deal with Trump to provide $40 million in free legal services. The move got Paul Weiss out from under an executive order that Karp said threatened the firm’s survival.

Jeh Johnson, the prominent Democrat and former Homeland Security Secretary, last month retired from the firm where he’d spent parts of 40 years. Days later, a high-profile group of litigators, including Karen Dunn, Bill Isaacson, and Jeannie Rhee, hit the exit to launch their own firm, which numbers seven ex-Paul Weiss partners so far. Also gone: Damian Williams, the former Manhattan US Attorney who bolted from Paul Weiss after six months on the job to join Jenner & Block, a firm that successfully fought off a Trump executive order in court. All have Democratic ties.

The departures accentuate a long-term trend at Paul Weiss, with the firm shifting its focus to lucrative work for private equity giants such as Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, and Bain Capital. That’s brought greater headcount, revenue, and profitability, but also challenged the firm’s identity.

“Paul Weiss made a decision a while ago to invest in their corporate work, and this is just a further development in that trajectory,” said Alisa Levin, a veteran recruiter with Greene-Levin-Snyder Legal Search Group. “Nobody has left yet from the corporate side and I doubt that anybody will.”

A Paul Weiss spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The firm under Karp has changed its compensation model so that partners don’t know what others earn, and it added a second tier of partners who don’t share in the firm’s profits. Some of those who departed for the new Dunn firm were in the income partner category, according to three sources familiar with the firm. The corporate practice now outnumbers the litigation group, data from Leopard Solutions show.

Karp, who has worked at Paul Weiss for more than 40 years, rose to prominence as a litigator and led the firm’s courtroom practice before becoming chairman in 2008. He’s become a go-to lawyer for the National Football League and built a reputation counseling major banks including Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. (Karp has also represented Bloomberg Law parent company Bloomberg LP in litigation.)

“I went to Paul Weiss because of the reputation as the finest litigation, white collar defense firm in the county,” he said in a 2024 podcast interview with Quinn Emanuel leader John Quinn.

Karp, who snagged Apollo as a major client on the litigation side, identified public M&A, private equity, and restructuring as three practice groups Paul Weiss needed to develop when he took the reins.

“You wouldn’t be at the top of the national or New York market if you were a very successful litigation defense boutique,” Karp said in the podcast interview. “We just had to be broader than that, and we had to be more resilient than that.”

He scored a coup bringing onboard Scott Barshay from Cravath Swaine & Moore in 2016. Barshay, as corporate department head, holds great sway within the firm, bringing in major business and leading some of its recruitment efforts. Barshay was among a small group of partners Karp consulted on how to respond to Trump’s executive order, the New York Times reported.

Litigator Tension

Tension between litigation and corporate groups is not unique to Paul Weiss.

Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s largest firm by revenue, was long known as a Chicago-based litigation shop before its corporate practice shot to the top of the industry on the back of the surging private equity industry in the mid-to-late 2010s. Kirkland is among the nine firms that made deals with Trump to avoid executive orders, pledging nearly $1 billion in free legal services.

Some Kirkland alumni describe litigation as an add-on “service” for corporate clients, a view that firm leader Jon Ballis, has pushed back against, saying that the firm’s litigation group would be larger than most law firms based on its revenue and is comparatively profitable to the firm’s corporate work. Kirkland’s litigation group has focused its work on major matters and been more receptive to alternative fee arrangements, which can bring large profit margins.

Paul Weiss’ litigators have maintained a lofty position in the industry. Top litigators include Ted Wells, former US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and appellate practice leader Kannon Shanmugam.

Many of the lawyers who departed had strong ties to Democrat politics, with Dunn prepping presidential candidate Kamala Harris for her debate with Trump, and Williams serving in a role appointed by President Joe Biden.

Karp told attendees at a litigation partner lunch last week that six of the firm’s 10 largest ongoing matters are litigation-related and none of those matters was generated or worked on by any of the partners who recently departed the firm, according to three people who attended the meeting.

“Paul Weiss is an institution, and the firm’s litigation team will continue on as a top-caliber group despite these departures,” said Jon Truster, a partner at recruiting firm Macrae.

Departure Fallout

Dunn and Isaacson joined the firm in a high-profile move from Boies Schiller Flexner in 2020. The group was known for its relationships with Big Tech clients such as Apple Inc., Oracle Corp., Facebook Inc., Uber Technologies Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., which it continued to represent at Paul Weiss.

Dunn also pursued pro bono work with Paul Weiss-like vigor, including representing plaintiffs in a lawsuit over the Charlottsville “Unite the Right” rally.

The firm’s commitment to pro bono work dates back at least a century. Paul Weiss attorneys worked to overturn the wrongful conviction of “the Scottsboro boys,” a group of Black teenagers in the 1930s who were falsely accused of raping a White woman in Alabama.

The firm opened an office in San Francisco—a historically difficult market to crack—shortly after the arrival of Dunn and Isaacson, signaling the hires’ impact. Paul Weiss’ Silicon Valley presence today numbers less than 40 lawyers, and it has only made one internal partner promotion there since the office opened.

Dunn appears set to continue her work with major clients. She’s notified courts in cases representing Google and Qualcomm of her change to a new firm, staying on the cases alongside other Paul Weiss lawyers.

She did withdraw from one case this week. She is no longer working alongside Paul Weiss lawyers representing the city of Springfield, Ohio in a pro bono case against the Blood Tribe, a group labeled as neo-Nazis by the Anti-Defamation League that rallied in the city in 2024 amid a campaign of conspiracy theories directed against its Haitian community.