New Law Firms Are Popping Up To Represent People Targeted By Trump

A new wave of law firms founded to meet the legal needs of civil servants and government critics is emerging in Washington as the industry responds to the first months of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Veteran litigators and former government attorneys have begun announcing the formation of new law firms aimed at representing individuals targeted by the president and government employees impacted by mass layoffs across the federal workforce. At least three such firms have opened their doors in the last two weeks.

“What we’re doing is a natural consequence of the way the administration is behaving,” said Clayton Bailey, a former Justice Department litigator who last week co-founded the Civil Service Law Center, a new firm that bills itself as “representing federal workers seeking fair treatment from an increasingly unfair government.”

“When you start doing a long string of lawless tactics across a number of different areas … it creates a need for more people to fill that gap and try to deal with the endless steam of injustice that’s coming out of the administration these days,” Bailey said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During the administration’s first 100 days, the White House executed an unprecedented pressure campaign against some of the nation’s largest law firms, sanctioning those associated with Trump’s political enemies and striking deals with others to ensure their legal support in matters supported by the president. One federal judge has already ruled that Trump’s order targeting the firm Perkins Coie was unconstitutional and other judges have mostly halted enforcement of orders against three additional firms.

In response, Abbe Lowell, the veteran defense attorney who has represented Hunter Biden, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, made the first move into the new boutique firm trend on May 2, announcing his departure from Winston & Strawn to start his own firm partially staffed by lawyers who had quit jobs at other major firms in protest of Big Law’s capitulation to the White House.

“I’ve been challenging government overreach of administrations for decades, regardless of political party, and this firm is a natural extension of that work with a handpicked team of skilled lawyers,” Lowell said in a statement. “We are seeing the legal industry weaponized to seek retribution and manipulated for purely political reasons. That’s where we step in.”

Lowell & Associates started with a high-profile client list that includes New York Attorney General Letitia James, now subject of a criminal investigation into alleged mortgage fraud, according to reports. Another client of Lowell’s, longtime Washington national security lawyer Mark Zaid, recently sued the administration challenging the revocation of his security clearance.

While Lowell represents some big names, other new firms boast a focus on representing civil servants whose lives have been upended by the administration’s cuts across the federal workforce. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been laid off since Trump’s inauguration and more cuts are planned, according to data tracked by The New York Times.

“It’s hard to overstate the impact that these actions are having on individuals across the country,” Bailey said of Trump’s cuts to the civil service. Bailey and his co-founder, Jessica Merry Samuels, both quit their jobs at the Department of Justice to start the Civil Service Law Center with the goal of helping affected federal workers get their claims addressed in federal court.

This week, two other former government lawyers announced another firm focused squarely on federal employment law. Pamela Hicks and Greg Pinto, who first met more than 15 years ago when Hicks was at the Justice Department and Pinto was at the Department of Homeland Security, launched the DC Law Collective on Tuesday and already have signed multiple clients.

Civil servants are “the most qualified and committed people you’ll ever meet,” Pinto said. “What’s happening to them is not right and we strongly feel that we have to stand up for them and we have to do something about it.”

Hicks herself was fired earlier this year from her position as chief counsel at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, traditionally a career role that doesn’t change with the administration. Hicks served as the ATF’s deputy chief counsel during the first Trump administration.

The sheer scale of Trump’s attacks on the federal workforce is driving the need for new firms dedicated to this issue, Hicks said.

“There’s always been federal employees who got fired, who felt like they were discriminated against or they were retaliated against for whistleblowing, that has always existed, but there’s never been this scale of need for representation,” she said.

“The process itself is being overwhelmed,” Pinto added. “Everything is being done here on a scale that’s pretty mind-boggling. We wouldn’t have come to this idea and gone ahead and executed it if it wasn’t for what’s going on now.”

There may be more announcements yet to come. Some employment law practices are seeing an uptick in demand for federal employment law expertise under the Trump administration, according to a Bloomberg Law survey. And there is wide acknowledgment among existing federal employment lawyers that Trump is creating massive demand for the service, Bailey, Hicks and Pinto say.

“When you’re joining a field of law … you get concerned, are we going to see any sort of sharp elbows, are we going to see people closing their doors trying to work for themselves? And in the last two weeks I can say that hasn’t been my experience at all,” Bailey said. “It is a space that recognizes that this is a really difficult moment that needs all hands on deck.”