Golden Quisling of the Week - Special Ongoing Citation Paul Weiss / Kirkland & Ellis: The Deal That Keeps Getting Worse

There is a lesson in the Darth Vader school of negotiation that apparently the finest legal minds in the country failed to absorb: the deal gets worse every time.

Paul Weiss and Kirkland & Ellis were among the first of the Big Law dominoes to fall. When Trump came after them — revoked security clearances, restricted federal building access, threatened to strangle their government contract pipeline — they did the math and decided the math said fold. They signed agreements committing hundreds of millions in pro bono legal services to causes the Trump administration would specify. They announced, with whatever dignity they could muster, that this work would be directed toward veterans, combating antisemitism, and the fairness of the justice system. Noble stuff. Reassuring stuff.

It was also, it turns out, a lie they told themselves.

Because what the pro bono hours actually went toward, once the ink dried and the cameras went away, was defending the Commerce Department. For free. Paul Weiss and Kirkland & Ellis — firms that charge north of a thousand dollars an hour for their attorneys' time — are now providing complimentary legal services to the executive branch of the United States government. The same executive branch that threatened them into the deal. They are, in the technical sense, working for the man who shook them down.

This would be bad enough if the shakedown had at least bought them peace. It did not. The administration came back. New demands, new exposure, new pressure — because of course it did. You do not appease a protection racket by paying the protection. You teach it that you pay. Every subsequent demand arrives with the implicit reminder: you already told us your price.

Their partners are leaving. Their clients are leaving — Microsoft dropped Simpson Thacher, a co-capitulator, and moved to Jenner & Block, a firm that fought back. Law students are publicly pledging not to work for the surrendered firms. The market, which these firms understand better than anyone, is rendering a verdict that their balance sheets have not yet fully absorbed.

And still, none of this is the worst part.

The worst part is that these are law firms. Not media companies with regulatory licenses to protect. Not universities dependent on federal research grants. Law firms. Institutions whose entire reason for existing is the adversarial defense of principle under pressure. The bar association is not just a professional credential — it is supposed to be a covenant. When the largest law firms in the country demonstrate, in writing, that their principles are negotiable at a price point, they do not just embarrass themselves. They communicate to every authoritarian watching that the American legal profession is available for conquest.

Paul Weiss and Kirkland & Ellis did not just fold. They showed everyone else the fold is survivable. They made the next fold easier. They are not merely Quislings — they are the Quislings who convinced the others that collaboration was an option.

The Golden Quisling is awarded not for weakness but for what the weakness costs everyone downstream. These firms have earned theirs many times over, and they are still earning it, at their standard hourly rate, on behalf of the people who broke them.