Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison began in New York in 1875 as a two-person general commercial practice. One hundred and fifty years later, it sits at the center of some of the most charged legal and political dramas in recent American history. A firm that once rallied over thirty law firms to defend immigrant families separated at the southern border became, in 2025, the first major firm to surrender to a presidential executive order targeting it. How does an institution that in 1946 made history by naming the first female partner at a major New York law firm end up, in 2026, with its longtime chairman resigning in disgrace after emails surfaced linking him to Jeffrey Epstein? The answer runs through a single strategic pivot, a single dominant client, and decades of choices about what price is worth paying to stay at the top.

• 2. A Firm Built on Firsts

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  Samuel William Weiss and Julius Frank opened their doors in 1875, and for decades the firm grew steadily through mergers and name changes. A defining moment came in 1923, when Samuel's son Louis Weiss launched his own practice with John F. Wharton; the two firms later combined into Cohen, Cole, Weiss & Wharton. In 1946, Lloyd K. Garrison and Randolph Paul joined, bringing the total lawyer count to thirteen and triggering yet another rename.

  That same year, 1946, the firm crossed a threshold no major New York law firm had reached before: it made Carolyn Agger a partner. Three years later, in 1949, William Thaddeus Coleman Jr. became the first person of color ever hired as an associate at a major New York City law firm. These were not incidental milestones. They shaped a reputation for being a different kind of elite firm, one that would attract future justices and cabinet secretaries as summer associates and junior lawyers for decades to come.

  Simon Rifkind arrived in 1950 and changed the firm's internal character. At the time, only one of the firm's twelve partners did trial work. Rifkind wanted to grow the litigation side, and he did. The firm's full name, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, dates from his arrival.

• 3. The Apollo Pivot

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  Brad Karp became chairman in 2008, and within a few years he made a decision that would define the firm's trajectory. He concluded that Paul, Weiss needed deeper exposure to the private equity industry to grow its revenue. Apollo Global Management became the result: it turned into the firm's most important client, eventually paying more than $200 million annually in legal fees.

  The numbers that followed were striking. Paul, Weiss revenue climbed from less than $700 million in 2009 to more than $3 billion by 2025, and Karp became one of the highest-paid lawyers in the world. The shift from litigation toward corporate law that Karp drove was the engine behind that growth.

  But concentration on a single client carried risks. When Paul, Weiss advised the casino operating unit of Caesars Entertainment in its bankruptcy proceedings starting in 2011, it eventually came out that Apollo, a private equity sponsor of Caesars, was also a Paul, Weiss client. The firm was found to have a conflict of interest, though an investigation found no actual harm to Caesars or its creditors. The episode was a preview of how the Apollo relationship would repeatedly pull the firm into uncomfortable territory.

• 4. Exxon and the Climate Cases

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  A 2021 assessment of law firms singled out Paul, Weiss as engaging in the most litigation, lobbying, and transactional work for fossil fuel companies among firms evaluated, and the firm received the lowest grade in a corresponding scorecard on climate change actions. That year also revealed that the firm had represented fossil fuel companies in thirty cases over the preceding five years.

  The central relationship was with Exxon Mobil, which Paul, Weiss had represented for over a decade in efforts to dismiss cases brought by U.S. cities and states seeking compensation for climate harms. In January and February 2020, students at Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, New York University School of Law, and the University of Michigan Law School protested the firm's campus recruitment events over that representation.

  The firm's work for Exxon extended into human rights territory as well. In 2023, Paul, Weiss defended ExxonMobil in a long-running case involving allegations that soldiers the company contracted in Indonesia had committed murder, torture, and sexual violence against villagers. Columbia law school lecturer Michael Paradis summarized the plaintiffs' endurance: "Exxon and its lawyers threw everything they could at them, and they overcame it." The case also produced a significant side consequence: Judge Lamberth ordered Exxon to pay around $289,000 in sanctions after finding that Alex Oh, while a Paul, Weiss partner and also enforcement director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, behaved improperly toward opposing counsel. Oh resigned from the SEC enforcement role shortly after.

• 5. Karp, Epstein, and Leon Black

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  The Apollo relationship did not stay within legal work. Brad Karp's entanglement with Apollo's co-founder Leon Black led him into contact with Leon Black's personal representative, Jeffrey Epstein.

  Emails that later became public showed Karp writing to Epstein in 2015, after Epstein had already pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of solicitation of prostitution with a minor and served a year in prison. Karp wrote, "I can't thank you enough for including me in an evening I'll never forget... It was truly 'once in a lifetime' in every way, though I hope to be invited again," and separately called Epstein "amazing." Bloomberg Legal noted that this correspondence occurred after the guilty plea and imprisonment.

  The emails also showed that Karp plotted with Epstein to attempt to arrange the deportation of a woman who was threatening to sue Leon Black for sexual abuse. When that effort failed, the woman was placed under surveillance. Several months before Epstein's death in 2019, Karp reviewed a draft court filing for Epstein and sent feedback by email, writing that he "particularly liked the argument" that victims "lied in wait and sat on their rights for their strategic advantage, knowing you were in prison, before they came forward."

  Karp resigned as chairman on the 4th of February 2026. He was replaced by Scott Barshay, though Karp remained with the firm as a partner in the litigation department.

• 6. The Trump Executive Order

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  Executive Order 14237, issued by President Donald Trump in 2025, targeted Paul, Weiss directly. It prohibited firm employees from entering government buildings, working for the government, or holding security clearances. The order cited the firm's diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and specifically named former partner Mark F. Pomerantz, who had played a leading role in the investigation that resulted in Trump's conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York. Pomerantz, who had left the firm in 2022, released a statement saying he had done nothing wrong.

  On March 19, Paul, Weiss told a judge in a New Jersey case that it had been fired by a client because of the executive order. One day later, on the 20th of March 2025, the firm agreed to a deal: in exchange for the order being lifted, Paul, Weiss committed $40 million toward pro bono legal services in support of Trump administration goals and agreed to abandon its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The firm's management believed, according to a March 2025 report by The New Yorker, that fighting the order in court had good prospects of success but that any win "would arrive too late."

  Perkins Coie, the other firm targeted by the same campaign, chose a different path: it sued and obtained a temporary restraining order. The contrast was not lost on observers. Over 140 Paul, Weiss alumni wrote a letter describing the firm's response as "capitulation to the Trump administration's bullying tactics." J. Michael Luttig, a judge appointed by George W. Bush, wrote that the firm had chosen "to cower before the powerful and sell out its firm and the nation's legal profession to the President." Two granddaughters of Simon Rifkind also wrote to the firm's managing partner criticizing the decision.

• 7. Departures and Lasting Damage

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  The consequences of the deal spread quickly. In May 2025, partners Karen Dunn, Bill Isaacson, Jessica Phillips, and Jeannie Rhee left Paul, Weiss to found their own firm, Dunn Isaacson Rhee. Partner Damian Williams departed for Jenner & Block in June 2025.

  The firm's concession also set a pattern across the profession. Other large law firms signed similar deals with the Trump administration in the months that followed. Washington analyst Nathan Tankus observed that the eagerness powerful law firms showed in conceding to the government was "an early sign" that American institutions were prepared to engage in "systematic appeasement towards Trump's second presidency."

  By August 2025, Paul, Weiss was performing free legal work for the United States Department of Commerce. In October 2025, Fabio Bertoni of The New Yorker wrote that the firm's decision to fold had been "shocking at the time, and was taken as a signal within the profession of where the 'smart money' was betting," contributing to a wider environment in which other powerful institutions found it difficult to resist presidential pressure.

  A Bloomberg Law report in March 2026 concluded that the agreement had weakened the firm's reputation, and that other law firms were struggling to fill the pro bono gap left by work Paul, Weiss no longer performed. The firm that in 2018 had led efforts to find more than 400 deported parents separated from their children at the southern border, nearly all of whom were located by November of that year, had by 2025 committed its pro bono resources to an administration pursuing similar family separation policies.