As Biglaw Shrinks From Taking on Trump, Boutiques Step Up
Litigators leaving Biglaw to launch boutiques predated Trump, of course—and the trend will continue long after he’s gone.
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A version of this article originally appeared on Bloomberg Law, part of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc. (800-372-1033), and is reproduced here with permission. The (detailed and lengthy) footnotes contain material that did not appear in the Bloomberg Law version of the piece. You can think of the footnotes as “bonus content” for Original Jurisdiction subscribers.
Four well-known litigators—Karen Dunn, Jeannie Rhee, Bill Isaacson, and Jessica Phillips—left Paul Weiss last month. Shortly thereafter, they launched Dunn Isaacson Rhee, which Dunn described as “a new litigation boutique specializing in high-stakes trials, investigations, and crisis management.”1
Also last month, prominent trial lawyer Abbe Lowell announced the founding of his own boutique, Lowell & Associates. This came after his departure from Winston & Strawn, where he had co-chaired the white-collar practice.
These boutiques share something in common besides timing and the presence of headline-making lawyers. I suspect both firms owe their existences to a certain Donald J. Trump.
Paul Weiss was the first of at least nine large law firms to reach controversial deals with the Trump administration, in which the firms agreed to provide pro bono legal services to support certain priorities of the administration. While the founding partners of Dunn Isaacson Rhee didn’t refer to the Paul Weiss settlement in announcing their departure, three out of the four have ties to Democratic politics—and it has been reported that they wanted to be able to sue the Trump administration “without limitations,” which having their own boutique allows them to do.
As for Lowell, he left Winston to start Lowell & Associates shortly after taking on New York Attorney General Letitia James, the target of a Trump administration investigation, as a client. And many other clients of his new firm are also in the crosshairs of Trump, as noted in a statement he shared with me:
In our first 30 days, we have filed a lawsuit and motion for preliminary injunction on behalf of a whistleblower attorney, Mark Zaid; co-counseled the complaint and preliminary injunction motion on behalf of AmeriCorps grantees; publicly defended Attorney General Letitia James and former DHS official Miles Taylor against the egregious and outrageous threats from this administration; drafted and filed an amicus brief for Judge Hannah Dugan; and advised immigration non-profit organizations on the administration’s executive orders.
“These early efforts reflect not only the volume and urgency of the challenges we face, but also the trust our clients and partners are placing in us,” he added.
Of course, partners leaving Biglaw to start their own firms is nothing new. It happened before Trump took office, and it will continue after he leaves office.
“It is unclear to me if the boutique creation can be meaningfully connected to the Trump executive orders,” said Indiana University law professor William Henderson, a longtime scholar of the legal profession. “Boutiques occur because partners with solid books want the autonomy to make their own decisions.”
But part of that autonomy includes the ability to take on clients and causes that it might be difficult or impossible to represent while at a large law firm. And with the Trump administration taking on such a wide range of issues and paying much closer attention to Biglaw, the universe of potentially problematic representations is significantly larger now, at least for lawyers at large firms—firms with large M&A practices, whose clients need their deals to get approved by the administration.2
“I’ve challenged federal and agency overreach under every administration since President Reagan,” said Lowell. “But what sets this administration apart is the sheer scale and scope of its intrusion into nearly every aspect of American life. That’s why Lowell & Associates is here—to defend against that overreach when it matters most.”
So it’s fair to say that recent activity in the boutique space “is closely tied to the Trump administration’s attacks on the legal industry,” as one legal recruiter told me. “From my conversations with partners launching new boutiques, they want the ability and the autonomy to fight the administration in court.”
And there’s a reason these lawyers are starting their own boutiques instead of simply moving to different large law firms.
“Leaving a firm because of its deal with Trump could have massive ramifications if the new firm they joined ended up doing the same,” this recruiter explained. “So, going on their own is the best option.” (This recruiter asked to remain anonymous because of the confidential nature of their conversations with partners who have left, or are thinking of leaving, their firms.)
So yes, the Trump administration might be intensifying the move of partners from Biglaw to boutiques. But it’s a trend that I predict will continue for quite some time, for at least three reasons.
First, and related to recent events, increased political polarization is making it harder for Biglaw firms to take on controversial cases. Large law firms have many more stakeholders and constituencies compared with boutiques, including more clients and employees—many of whom object to the firm taking on certain hot-button representations.
But these matters can be particularly meaningful and satisfying for individual attorneys to work on—and they can come from across the political or ideological spectrum. Back in 2022, for example, Paul Clement and Erin Murphy left Kirkland & Ellis to start a boutique after Kirkland announced it would no longer represent clients in Second Amendment matters.3
Second, Biglaw billing rates continue to climb, hitting record highs—which many litigation clients can’t afford, at least not to the extent that corporations executing billion-dollar transactions can.4 Not surprisingly, Lowell cited greater flexibility in billing rates as another attraction of launching his own firm, on top of more freedom in taking cases.5
Third, technology enables litigators at boutiques to handle certain matters that previously were the exclusive province of Biglaw. For example, if artificial intelligence tools can review and organize massive volumes of documents, an army of associates might not be required to litigate a large and complex case.6
The migration of litigators from Biglaw to boutiques is a trend with the wind at its back. The Trump administration might be accelerating it, to be sure—as it’s doing with many other trends in American society. But the allure of greater autonomy for Biglaw partners existed before Trump took office, and it will persist long after he’s gone.7
They have since been joined by a fifth Paul Weiss partner, D.C.-based litigator Kyle Smith, who announced his move on LinkedIn last weekend.
If a law firm takes on a case that makes the administration unhappy, the firm could find itself on the receiving end of an executive order—which might explain why some Biglaw firms are turning away pro bono cases that could tick off Trump, such as litigation to protect the rights of immigrants.
Leaving Kirkland wasn’t Paul Clement’s first such move. Back in 2011, he left King & Spalding, after the firm refused to let him defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). He took his talents to a boutique, Bancroft, founded by Viet Dinh, another prominent conservative lawyer.
Bancroft no longer exists, after Kirkland hired all of Bancroft’s lawyers in 2016 (which is how Clement wound up back in Biglaw). But other boutiques continue to handle right-of-center cases and clients that it would be difficult to represent in the left-leaning world of Biglaw, such as Cooper & Kirk and Consovoy McCarthy.
On the other side of the aisle, I suspect that a desire to take on progressive but politically charged cases contributed to Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan leaving Paul Weiss to launch Kaplan & Company (later Kaplan Hecker & Fink) and Marc Elias departing from Perkins Coie to form Elias Law Group. Both conservatives and progressives can benefit from the freedom enjoyed by boutiques.
For example, consider individual defendants in criminal cases. Even very wealthy individuals don’t have the same financial resources as, say, Fortune 500 companies. So it’s no coincidence that some of the nation’s top criminal defense lawyers—including two of my past podcast guests, David Oscar Markus and Alexandra Shapiro—practice at boutiques, where they can be more flexible on rates. (In addition, some Biglaw firms might be uncomfortable representing criminal defendants in cases with lurid allegations.)
Boutiques might not be much cheaper (or cheaper at all) compared to Biglaw—but boutiques are definitely more flexible in billing arrangements than large firms, which tend to be bureaucratic about billing (partly because of pressure from transactional partners who mostly bill by the hour and want to hold the line on rates). Boutique founders like Beth Wilkinson of Wilkinson Stekloff and Scott Keller of Lehotsky Keller Cohen have told me that they—and their clients—value this flexibility.
A fourth factor driving the rise of boutiques: client conflicts. Biglaw firms have far more of them, and they can prevent litigators from taking on some of the most interesting and important cases that come their way. And if a Biglaw firm has to decide whether to go with a litigation client, with a one-off matter that might settle the next week, or a transactional client, which the firm could be representing in deals for years, it will almost always go with the transactional client.
Name partners at boutiques like Tom Clare and Libby Locke of Clare Locke, Chris Clark of Clark Smith Villazor, and Steve Molo of MoloLamken have cited conflicts to me as a factor in their decision to leave Biglaw. In the case of MoloLamken, for example, the firm was able to handle residential mortgage-backed securities cases because it could be adverse to banks (which few Biglaw firms have the ability to do). And a conflict also contributed to David Boies leaving Cravath to launch Boies Schiller Flexner (which started off as a boutique in 1997, even though today it’s an Am Law 200 firm).
The Biglaw-to-boutique trend is so well-established that now boutiques are spawning boutiques themselves—e.g., Kaplan Martin from Kaplan Hecker & Fink (now Hecker Fink), Elsberg Baker & Maruri from Selendy Gay Elsberg (now Selendy Gay once again), and Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch from Clare Locke.
And so many lawyers are making this move that there’s even a company out there dedicated to advising partners who want to leave Biglaw and launch boutiques: NexFirm, longtime sponsor of the Original Jurisdiction podcast.
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Off topic, but newsworthy: Rest in peace, Lee Godfrey of Houston-based Susman Godfrey.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/houstonchronicle/name/h-lee-godfrey-obituary?id=58546406
Pretty sad that the transactional lawyers are both driving rate inflation and lawyer capitulation to Government simultaneously. How proud they must be.