Paul Weiss strategy tested as partners leaving Post-Trump Deal | Company Business News

The leader of Paul Weiss, Brad Karp, has spent more than a decade to build his firm’s presentation practice at an elite level that matches the litigation work. A transaction he concluded with President Donald Trump threatens the balance between the two. The Wall Street firm has lost a series of litigation partners after March 20 with Trump to deliver $ 40 million to free legal services. The move praised Paul Weiss under an executive order that Karp said that the firm’s survival had threatened. Jeh Johnson, the prominent Democrat and former secretary of domestic safety, retired from the firm last month where he spent parts of 40 years. Days later, a high-profile group of litigators, including Karen Dunn, Bill Isaacson and Jeannie Rhee, made the exit to launch their own firm, which is so far seven former Paul Weiss partners. Also Road: Damian Williams, the former US lawyer in Manhattan who, after six months of Paul Weiss, bolted to join Jenner & Block, a firm that successfully fought a Trump executive order in court. Everyone has democratic ties. The departure highlights a long-term trend at Paul Weiss, with the firm shifting its focus to profitable work for private equity giants such as Apollo Global Management, Blackstone and Bain Capital. It brought a greater time, income and profitability, but also challenged the firm’s identity. “Paul Weiss made a decision a while ago to invest in their corporate work, and it’s just a further development in that track,” says Alisa Levin, a veteran recruiter at Greene-Levin-Snergser Legal Search Group. “No one has been left on the corporate side yet and I doubt anyone will do it.” A spokesman for Paul Weiss did not respond to a request for comment. The firm under Carp has changed its remuneration model so that partners do not know what others deserve, and it added a second level of partners who do not share in the gains of the firm. Some of those who left for the new Dunn firm were, according to three sources familiar with the firm. Corporate practice now exceeds the litigation group, according to the Leopard solutions. Carp, who has worked at Paul Weiss for more than 40 years, became prominent as a litigator and led the firm’s courtroom practice before becoming chairman in 2008. He became a good lawyer for the National Football League and built up a large banks for reputation counseling, including Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. “I went to Paul Weiss because of the reputation as the best litigation, white -collar defirmation firm in the country,” he said in a podcast interview in 2024 with the leader of the Quinn Emanuel, John Quinn. Carp, who snapped Apollo as a large client on the litigation side, identified public M&A, private equity and restructuring as three practice groups that Paul Weiss needed to develop when he took the reins. “You wouldn’t be above the national or New York market if you were a very successful defense boutique for litigation,” Karp said in the Podcast interview. “We just had to be broader than that, and we had to be more resilient than that.” He achieved a coup that brought Scott Barshay aboard Cravathe SWaine & Moore in 2016. Barshay, as head of the Department of Enterprises, holds big in the firm, which does great business and leads some of his recruitment efforts. Barshay was one of a small group of partners who consulted Carp on how to respond to Trump’s executive order, the New York Times reports. The tension of the litigator tension between litigation and corporate groups is not unique to Paul Weiss. Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s largest firm by revenue, has long been known as a litigation store in Chicago before his corporate practice was shot to the top of the industry on the back of the growing private equity industry in the middle-to-late 2010s. Kirkland is one of the nine firms Trump did with Trump to avoid executive orders, and promised nearly $ 1 billion in free legal services. Some Kirkland alumni describes litigation as an additional ‘service’ for corporate clients, a view against which firm leader Jon Ballis returned, saying that the firm’s litigation group would be larger than most law firms based on its turnover and relatively profitable for the company’s corporate work. Kirkland’s litigation group focused on major matters and was more receptive to alternative fee arrangements, which could bring major profit margins. Paul Weiss’s litigators have maintained an elevated position in the industry. Top Litigators include Ted Wells, former US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and the leader of the appeal practice, Kannon Shanmugam. Many of the advocates who left had strong ties with democratic politics, with Dunn proposing presidential candidate Kamala Harris for her debate with Trump, and Williams serving in a role appointed by President Joe Biden. Karp told the participants in a lunch of a litigation partner last week that six of the firm’s ten largest continued matters are litigation -related and that none of these cases have been generated or worked by one of the partners who recently left the firm, according to three people who attended the meeting. “Paul Weiss is an institution, and the firm’s litigation team will continue as a top caliber group despite this departure,” says Jon Truster, a partner at the recruitment of 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 customers such as Apple Inc., Oracle Corp., Facebook Inc., Uber Technologies Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., which represents it at Paul Weiss. Dunn also pursued a pro bono work with Paul Weiss-like power, including the representation of plaintiffs in a lawsuit on the Charlottsville ‘the right’ rally. The firm’s commitment to Pro Bono work dates back to at least a century. Paul Weiss attorneys worked for the wrongful belief of “The Scottsboro Boys”, a group of black teenagers in the thirties, to stop being false 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, indicating the impact of the rent. Paul Weiss’s Silicon Valley presence counts less than 40 advocates today, and it has made only one internal partner promotion there since the office opened. Dunn seems to continue with large customers. She has notified courts in cases that represent Google and Qualcomm of her change to a new firm, and remain with other Paul Weiss advocates on the business. She withdrew from one case this week. She no longer works with Paul Weiss advocates representing the City of Springfield, Ohio in a Pro Bono case against the Blood Tribe, a group marked by the Anti-Beeld League in the city in the city in the midst of conspiracy theories directed against the Haitian community. To contact the reporters about this story: Roy Strom in Chicago at [email protected]; Justin Henry in Washington DC at [email protected] to contact the editors responsible for this story: Chris Opfer at [email protected]; John Hughes at [email protected]; Alessandra Rafferty at [email protected] © 2025 Bloomberg MP This article was generated from an automatic news agency feed without edits to text.