As part of the Knight Institute’s project on the role of the legal profession in an age of authoritarianism, we recorded a six-episode podcast, Lawyering Without Law, which I co-hosted with Madhav Khosla, the Knight Institute’s Senior Fellow. We interviewed top scholars and former government lawyers on the unique and important role that lawyers play in defending democracy, or in facilitating the slide into authoritarianism. The complete podcast series is available here or wherever you get your podcasts.

With the start of a new academic year upon us, as approximately 150,000 students are in their first weeks of law school, I’m writing a series of reflections on the conversations we had with podcast guests, thinking about the future of legal education and of professional responsibility. Other posts in this series are available here.

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The deals that several Big Law firms made with the Trump administration in the first months of 2025 came up repeatedly in our podcast conversations, as we contemplated their significance for the legal profession. Professor Lawrence Lessig, the guest for our second episode, offered his concept of “institutional corruption” to explain why these firms chose to make agreements that are so repugnant to the legal profession’s self-conception as well as its duty to be independent.

Lessig defines institutional corruption as influences, especially economic ones, that guide an institution away from what its underlying purpose is supposed to be. In our conversation, he applied it to these firms:

I think it’s because these people have begun to conceive of their job as the job of just maximizing the wealth of their firm… And that’s what we’re seeing in corporations today. You say you’re a news organization. No, no, you’re a corporation. Your job is to maximize wealth. So, if you’ve got this tyrant who comes along, and says, 'Sell your news department to me, and bend over backwards,' if that increases the shareholder value, that’s your job. You have no choice to do anything else except that. We increasingly see it in other organizations that also have kind of money at their core. So, we certainly see it in the context of these law firms who I think just thought, ‘This is simple. We can make this problem go away, and we’ll still have our bonuses at the end of the year….’ And if you don’t have people who are willing to say, ‘I get this is how I maximize my wealth, but this is how I am human. This is what I do to be human,’ we’re lost. We need those people, and we don’t have them right now. (9:38-12:53)

Our conversation with Lessig helped me pinpoint why the law firm agreements with Trump made me so angry at the time they were struck, and why I continue to think of them as such a significant event in the history of this administration’s authoritarian attacks. It was the scale of the trade these firms decided to make, and how easily they made it: protecting their profits outweighed even the imperative to resist an attack on the foundations of the rule of law itself. The leadership of those firms knew as well as any of us that if law firms are not free to represent any client of their choosing, the concept of the independent bar fails. Equally true, if these firms’ potential clients cannot trust that their lawyers are not looking over their shoulder to weigh whether a future administration might attack them for representing that client, or for particular arguments they make on their behalf, they will lose faith in these firms, and perhaps in the legal system itself.

These firms knew all of this, and made a deal anyway. They did it even though they have ample financial resources and legal firepower to fight back, to a far greater degree than some of the other independent institutions Trump has similarly attacked. It is simply shameful.

How do we hold them accountable for the choices they made? Although I believe Lessig’s institutional corruption theory is correct, it is hard to envision Big Law firms becoming less profit-driven. Nor is the decision to make a deal with the Trump administration, no matter how ill-advised, a matter for disciplinary measures from bar authorities.

However, another path to accountability lies in making sure that this episode is not forgotten by the public, or allowed to fade into obscurity. Democrats in Congress have already signaled that they will investigate the nine firms that made deals with the Trump administration, whether through hearings or written requests for information. The Knight Institute has filed a FOIA request asking for the text of these agreements, which have still not been made public.

The deals these firms made are a matter of enormous public interest: They go to the heart of public confidence in the integrity of the legal profession. The public has a right to know what these firms discussed with the administration, what they agreed to, and what justifications they can offer for their decisions. Law students deserve to know more about the character of the leadership at law firms they are considering working for. These firms’ present and potential future clients deserve to know whether their lawyers are willing and able to provide the “zealous advocacy” that legal ethics requires. And the firms themselves, along with other powerful institutions that chose to capitulate to unconstitutional pressure rather than to fight back, need to see that these choices will become an enduring part of their legacy.