Two weeks ago, Brad Karp, chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, announced that President Trump would dismiss an executive order aimed at the law firm in return for commitments that included $40 million in pro bono legal services for causes Mr. Trump championed.
Mr. Karp said in an staffwide email that the deal was consistent with the giant firm’s statement of principles. The precepts were written in 1963 by its esteemed name partner, Judge Simon H. Rifkind, to cement the firm’s fidelity to democracy and the law.
But last week, Judge Rifkind’s granddaughters Amy and Nina Rifkind, both lawyers themselves, wrote to Mr. Karp, saying they were stunned by the deal he had personally hammered out at the White House, and by how he had invoked their grandfather’s principles to justify it.
“Amid our heartbreak about the assault on rule of law in our country and the executive order targeting Paul Weiss,” the Rifkind sisters wrote, “you traveled to Washington to surrender before you had even begun to fight.”
They added: “It is plain to us, as it would have been to our grandfather, that taking action to stay off an enemies list does not advance the rule of law as embodied in the statement of principles, it undercuts it and emboldens those who seek to dismantle it.”
The Rifkinds’ two-page letter, which was obtained by The New York Times, echoes reactions that have reverberated through the legal community in the wake of the firm’s deal with Mr. Trump. Critics have accused the firm of capitulating to intimidation, rather than fighting the order in court. Mr. Karp has told colleagues that the deal was necessary because Paul Weiss faced a threat unlike any in its 150-year history.
A Paul Weiss spokeswoman did not respond to a request seeking comment on the letter.
Since the deal was reached on March 20, Mr. Trump has issued executive orders directed at other law firms, with several resisting with lawsuits against the administration. Those firms have won initial successes: On Friday, judges issued temporary restraining orders blocking many of the restrictions aimed at two of those firms.
Three other firms agreed recently to deals with the White House. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social that the firm Milbank had agreed to provide $100 million in legal services for causes the administration supported.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump announced that Willkie Farr & Gallagher had pledged $100 million. The Times has reported that the White House explicitly warned the firm that it was next on the president’s list and “outlined a proposed alternative.”
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom also agreed to provide $100 million in legal work, a deal it said was “in the best interests of our clients, our people and our firms.”
The work of Paul Weiss, with offices around the world, includes mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and white-collar and regulatory defense and litigation. The firm, which had revenue last year of more than $2.6 billion, according to Law360, also has a large pro bono practice. Mr. Trump’s order would have suspended Paul Weiss’s security clearances and prohibited its lawyers from entering federal buildings.
Mr. Karp, in a second email to colleagues, on March 23, said that Paul Weiss had prepared to challenge the executive order in court “in the finest traditions of the firm.” But it became clear, Mr. Karp wrote, that even if the firm initially succeeded in blocking the order, clients would perceive Paul Weiss as persona non grata with the administration and many would not stay with the firm.
Mr. Karp also said that other firms, rather than supporting Paul Weiss, had begun to aggressively solicit its clients and recruit its lawyers.
“It was very likely that our firm would not be able to survive a protracted dispute with the administration,” Mr. Karp wrote to his colleagues.
Mr. Karp said that when he learned the administration might be willing to reach a resolution, “we did exactly what we advise our clients to do in ‘bet the company’ litigation every day.”
He said the firm began talks seeking “a lasting settlement that would not require us to compromise our core values and fundamental principles.”
Amy and Nina Rifkind said in their letter that they understood running a large law firm involved balancing conflicting interests. They said they also realized that Mr. Karp believed he faced “an existential crisis over the firm’s survival and an agonizing choice between litigating and negotiating.”
But they argued that the stakes of the situation were larger than the firm’s survival. “Nothing short of the integrity of the entire legal system is at stake,” the Rifkinds wrote.
They added, “We are confident that our grandfather would have recognized in this delicate moment, when the country hovers between a new authoritarianism and its longstanding freedoms, that what is good for the nation and rule of law is good for Paul Weiss, not the other way around.”
The Rifkinds asked Mr. Karp to share the letter with his partners and they also sent it to several dozen themselves. Amy Rifkind said that Mr. Karp had responded promptly to their letter and politely acknowledged receiving it.
On Wednesday, Penny Paul, a granddaughter of Randolph E. Paul, another of the firm’s name partners, said that after reading about the Rifkinds’ letter, she applauded their statement. “I echo their sentiments,” she said. Ms. Paul is a nonpracticing lawyer in the communications department at the law firm Lowenstein Sandler’s Roseland, N.J., office.
Judge Rifkind was born in 1901 in Meretz, Russia, and was brought to New York in 1910, where his father worked on the Lower East Side as a woolens merchant. He graduated in 1922 from City College, obtained his law degree from Columbia in 1925 and served as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York from 1941 until 1950.
He resigned from the bench in 1950 and joined Paul Weiss, where he won renown as a trial lawyer in courts at all levels, including in the Supreme Court.
Judge Rifkind died in 1995 at the age of 94. His obituary in The Times noted that he was praised as pragmatic, quick-witted and hard-working. It described him as a physically modest figure, carrying 140 pounds on a 5-foot-6-inch frame, with blue eyes that looked owlishly through heavy-rimmed spectacles.
“Yet, he loomed large for years behind the scenes at Paul Weiss, doing much to expand its roster of lawyers, its workload and its revenues,” the obituary said.
He also wrote the firm’s principles, which highlighted the values that had given Paul Weiss a reputation in the legal community for diversity and inclusivity — it was, in the 1950s and ’60s, one of the few large firms that would hire and promote Jews.
Amy and Nina Rifkind said in an interview that they had decided to write the letter after learning of Mr. Karp’s emails to his colleagues explaining his rationale.
“We immediately had the same reaction,” said Amy Rifkind, who practices real estate law in Washington, D.C. “That is not what our grandfather would have thought Paul Weiss should do.”
She said that led them to begin thinking further about what the principles really meant.
“Seeing our grandfather’s name in the news like that motivated us to speak for what we believed he would have been fighting for at this moment,” Amy Rifkind said.
The sisters remembered living in Manhattan and walking to their grandparents’ apartment where they listened as their father and grandfather discuss the law.
“We grew up as lawyers and did forge our own paths,” said Nina Rifkind, who practices in Oxford, Miss., and is an adjunct law professor at the University of Mississippi. “Clearly the paths were shaped by and influenced by the values and principles that our grandfather articulated.”
Mr. Karp, in his initial email to colleagues, cited one of Judge Rifkind’s commitments: “We are committed to achieving our objectives without wearing any client’s collar or any political party’s livery. And we believe that in the pursuit of these ends we can maintain a law firm in which all who are associated with it may justly take pride.”
Amy and Nina Rifkind, in their letter, said that for their grandfather, “the touchstone” was another of the principles: “In all things to govern ourselves as members of a free democratic society with responsibilities both to our profession and our country.”
The Rifkinds asked that unless Mr. Karp was willing to make a priority of his responsibilities both to “our profession and our country,” that he “cease invoking our grandfather’s name to justify your actions.”
