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The decision by nine of America’s biggest law firms to “bend the knee” to President Trump drew condemnation among lawyers across the political spectrum, including from attorneys inside the firms who quit or launched resistance campaigns. Others have chosen a less career-limiting form of rebellion.
That would be offering leaks to Above the Law, a pugnacious legal industry website best known for scoops about law firm annual bonuses, snarky coverage of legal news and salacious stories of barristers behaving badly. But since March, when Mr. Trump began targeting for retribution top law firms whose clients and past work he does not like, Above the Law has become a rage read for lawyers incensed at the firms that accommodated him.
Fueled by a stream of inside-the-conference-room exclusives, Above the Law delivers a daily public spanking to what it calls “The Yellow-Bellied Nine.” Those are the elite firms who pledged a collective $1 billion in free legal work to Mr. Trump after he signed executive orders threatening to bar their lawyers from federal buildings, suspend their security clearances and cancel their government contracts.
In the words of Above the Law, the firms “folded like a damp cocktail napkin” to the president’s demands for “pro bono payola.”
“For demoralized people stuck inside these firms, I think this is catharsis,” said Kevin Carroll, a Washington lawyer who once worked at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. (Quinn Emanuel has not been threatened by Mr. Trump, although its comanaging partner, William A. Burck, was fired as an outside ethics counsel for the Trump Organization by Mr. Trump’s sons in April. Mr. Burck’s offense was signing up to also represent Harvard, one of Mr. Trump’s prime targets in his crackdown on the nation’s top colleges.)
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