Protecting Our Firm and Safeguarding the Interests of Our Clients

Key Excerpts

• The President’s Executive Order challenged here presents dangerous incentives to lawyers to quiet their voices, limit their arguments, or forgo the legal process at all.
• The principle that every person deserves competent legal representation is nonpartisan, longstanding, and fundamental to the rule of law.
• The Executive Order repudiates the time-honored tradition that, as lawyers across the political spectrum have recognized, the justice system functions best when there is zealous, high-quality advocacy on all sides.
• While our positions in litigation may differ, the states, the courts, and the public all benefit when all sides to a dispute are effectively represented.

Key Excerpts

• The [Executive] Order is an affront to the Constitution and our adversarial system of justice. Its plain purpose is to bully those who advocate points of view that the President perceives as adverse to the views of his Administration. 
• The firm is comprised of lawyers who advocate for clients; its attorneys and employees are not activists or partisans. But Perkins Coie's ability to represent the interests of its clients—and its ability to operate as a legal-services business at all—are under direct and imminent threat.
• Perkins Coie cannot allow its clients to be bullied.
• The firm is committed to a resolute defense of the rule of law, without regard to party or ideology.

Key Excerpts

• Perkins Coie lawyers . . . practice at the highest levels of the profession in federal and state courts across the country, before more than 90 federal agencies, and in varied transactional settings. They serve their communities as Sunday school teachers, Scout leaders, youth sports coaches, military reservists, and board members of civic organizations.
• Lawyers protect and promote our cherished freedoms, including the rights to free speech and to petition the government, and safeguard the rule of law that underpins our democratic system.
• Critical to this role is lawyers’ time-honored duty to advocate zealously for their clients, no matter how controversial. Zealous advocacy serves as a bulwark against government abuses that erode the rule of law.
• In keeping with the highest tradition of the legal profession, Perkins Coie has zealously advocated for its clients in matters large and small since the Firm’s founding more than a century ago. The President’s Executive Order attacks Perkins Coie and its clients for that advocacy. The Firm already has suffered significant harm, and that harm is increasing every day.
• Although the Executive Order is expressly political, its consequences are not. The Order already has produced several harmful effects for Perkins Coie and its clients. Government officials already have invoked the Order to refuse to meet with Perkins Coie attorneys—including on matters having nothing to do with presidential politics or government contracting. Agencies already have asked Perkins Coie clients to disclose whether they have a relationship with the Firm. Some clients already have chosen to move work elsewhere. And other clients have expressed grave concern about the consequences of continuing to retain Perkins Coie if this illegal Order is not enjoined.

Key Excerpts

• The Executive Order directed at Perkins Coie and its lawyers, if allowed to stand, will undermine fundamental principles of the system of justice in the United States.
• Law firms will be less likely to represent clients that the President or his allies and supporters view with disfavor or clients that are unpopular with the President’s base.
• Clients (especially clients not aligned with the President) are likely to have a narrower choice of counsel and to have greater difficulty finding counsel.

Key Excerpts

• [T]he Executive Order will be understood by lawyers and law firms as an extreme, dangerous, and unprecedented effort to intimidate them and prevent them from representing clients whom the President does not wish to have legal counsel.
• If implemented, the Executive Order will have the effect of preventing lawyers from performing their required role in our democracy, and it will inflict grievous harm on the administration of justice in the United States.

Key Excerpts   

• Perkins Coie’s attorneys are drawn from all sides of the political spectrum, and most of our attorneys are not politically active. There are attorneys who are liberal and attorneys who are conservative.
• Many of our attorneys joined the firm after government service under both Democratic and Republican administrations, or after serving as judges or judicial law clerks to judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents. Reflecting this bipartisan ethos, in recent years, four Perkins Coie partners have been nominated and confirmed to serve as federal judges – two by President Trump in 2019, and two by President Biden in 2021 and 2023.
• Perkins Coie is dedicated to our clients, our communities, and each other. The firm has a longstanding, firmwide commitment to pro bono service. Since 1989, the firm has provided approximately 1.45 million hours of pro bono service to innumerable clients, including veterans, indigent families, disabled persons, and community-based organizations of all sizes.

Key Excerpts

• The Executive Order is inconsistent with, and interferes with, settled understandings of the separation of powers and, in particular, judicial regulation of the legal profession.
• Professional conduct rules recognize that a lawyer must “represent a client zealously and diligently within the bounds of the law,” D.C. Rules Rule 1.3(a)…. The Executive Order will interfere with this fundamental obligation of lawyers because it will chill Perkins Coie and other law firms from representing clients zealously and diligently, for fear of being branded pariahs by the federal government.
• This form of regulation by presidential whim… threatens to undermine the judicial regulation that requires lawyers to represent clients zealously and not to subordinate clients’ interests to and lawyers’ own self-interest.