In a clear and excellent column national security lawyer Mary McCord reminds us how our legal system works. She is a former Assistant Attorney General and a leader of our Keep Our Republic group. T

The Washington Post

Opinion

The White House war on Big Law hits some speed bumps

The White House is waging war on lawyers. Some judges are having none of it.

April 7, 2025

By Mary McCord

Mary B. McCord is the executive director of Georgetown Law School’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and a former acting assistant attorney general for national security and longtime federal prosecutor.

Here’s where things stand in the administration’s war on law firms: Over the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has blacklisted three firms for representing his perceived political opponents, for litigating in opposition to his priorities, and for hiring lawyers who were involved in investigations against the president before he was elected.

But we’ve also seen three federal judges issue temporary restraining orders declaring provisions of those executive orders unconstitutional; barring them from limiting the firms’ lawyers from entering federal government buildings and engaging with government employees; and from terminating government contracts with the firms and their clients.

In each case, the restraining orders were entered in near-record time: two of them on the same day that the firms filed their lawsuits.

Why are judges rushing to stop Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms? Because the adversarial process is the cornerstone of America’s legal system. When there are no lawyers to represent the opposition to the administration’s executive overreach, we have no adversarial system, no due process, no rule of law.

Judges presiding over civil and criminal cases depend on lawyers to represent the parties before them. The constitutional right to counsel is so fundamental to our system that in criminal cases, if a person can’t afford a lawyer, the court will appoint a lawyer for him. Lawyers provide ethical representation not only to people and causes that have popular approval but also to those that do not.

In this way, the lawyers on opposite sides of a case advocate for their clients both by presenting the facts (through the introduction of evidence) and making legal arguments based on those facts. It is how due process of law — the constitutional entitlement to have rights and responsibilities decided by competent, independent judges — is achieved.

By having both sides of a dispute presented in court, judges are better able to assess the merits and render informed judgments.

Donald Trump has been a big beneficiary of this adversary system. In civil and criminal cases, he has relied on competent lawyers to represent him. Defending him against civil charges of sexual assault and defamation, or against criminal charges of mishandling classified information or conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election, may have seemed unpalatable to some Americans. But it was the duty of lawyers to provide him with effective representation, and they did. Sometimes he prevailed and sometimes he did not, but there is no question that he received due process of law.

Now, the president seeks to deprive others of the benefits of our adversarial system. His attacks on law firms for representing people and causes with which he disagrees are designed to intimidate those firms into declining to provide representation they otherwise would provide. And it is working: Reports of law firms declining to take on pro bono work challenging executive actions and declining to represent individuals targeted by the federal government are spreading rapidly through the legal community. Although nonprofit legal organizations have ramped up their work to fill the gaps, their resources are not endless. The fewer lawyers available to challenge executive actions, the more those actions may go unchallenged, even when they are unlawful.

In enjoining the most damaging provisions of the order blacklisting law firm WilmerHale for “partisan” litigation and for hiring lawyers who investigated Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election, Senior U.S. District Judge Richard Leon wrote, “The retaliatory nature of the Executive Order at issue here is clear from its face. … There is no doubt this retaliatory action chills speech and legal advocacy, or that it qualifies as a constitutional harm.” As a judge for 23 years, Leon was well aware of the damage that an order like this could do not just to WilmerHale, but also to the adversarial system.

Enjoining the similarly egregious sections of the order blacklisting law firm Perkins Coie for its representation of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and for challenging voter identification laws, Senior U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell explained it in starker terms: “Our justice system is based on the fundamental belief that justice works best when all parties have zealous advocates, when all sides have vigorous representation and can present for the Court to hear powerful statements on both sides of the question.”

Law firms that have invoked their constitutional rights to challenge these retaliatory orders are 3 and 0 so far. They are winning not just for themselves and their clients, but for the adversarial system that undergirds the rule of law.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/07/trump-war-biglaw-lawyers-law-firms/