New Law Firm Donation Data from Professor Derek Muller Is Wake-up Call to Corporate America

While the American electorate has shifted rightward—note the six-point swing in President Trump’s popular vote margin between 2020 and 2024—Big Law has accelerated in the opposite direction. America’s largest law firms didn’t just maintain their liberal tilt; they reached levels of ideological uniformity that should alarm any corporate executive relying on these firms for balanced legal guidance.

This is clear from research just released by Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller and reported by David Lat in Bloomberg Law. Among his many contributions to legal scholarship, Muller has been a go-to source for producing useful compendiums and snapshots as to where the largest law firms stand on various metrics that serve as proxies for politics and ideology. He has been tracking political contributions from major law firms since he examined data from the Obama-Romney race in 2012. He conducted further research after the 2020 election and is now analyzing the 2024 election. These last two studies covered donations by employees of law firms to the presidential candidates (Trump, Biden, and later Harris), major party organizations such as the RNC and DNC, and two major aggregators of campaign contributions, ActBlue and WinRed. Muller looked at two groups of firms—the AmLaw 100 and 50 of the nation’s top plaintiffs’ firms. Muller acknowledges that his research is not exhaustive. But it is impressive, and it offers a look at the legal profession that is revealing—and disturbing. Here we will focus on the AmLaw 100.

The following chart breaks down the giving ratio in 2023–2024 by firm:

The numbers are staggering. Not a single AmLaw 100 firm had majority Republican giving in the 2024 election cycle—in contrast to the 2020 cycle, when three AmLaw 100 firm employees gave mostly to Republicans. The latest study showed only six firms with 25% or more employee contributions going to Republicans, in contrast to over 20 firms reaching the 25% threshold in the 2020 cycle.

Where is the ideological balance in today’s AmLaw 100? Gibson Dunn, known historically as one of the more Republican-leaning major corporate firms, totals 92% Democratic giving in Muller’s study—yet this still makes it more politically “diverse” than most. Never mind that, in raw dollars, Gibson employees gave $1,996,627 to Democratic outlets versus $174,780 to Republican outlets. And the latter figure represents the fifth highest dollar total an AmLaw 100 firm’s employees gave to Republicans.

The highest Republican total in raw dollars came from Sullivan & Cromwell—$762,404—while that same firm’s employees gave 78% of their donations—$2,680,952—to Democrats. Jones Day, which is well known for its Republican attorneys who received appointments during the Trump administration, also had a 78% rate of giving to Democrats.

In short, Big Law has lost all meaningful political balance. Consider what that means for Corporate America—the most important clients for AmLaw 100 firms—as they face an increasingly challenging regulatory landscape. The same firms showing near-unanimous Democratic alignment are the ones Corporate America turns to for counsel on compliance, government investigations, and broad strategic advice. When a law firm’s political contributions flow 12 to 1 toward one party, how effectively can that firm truly anticipate today’s enforcement actions or comply with increasingly constitutionalist judicial decisions?

In recent years, companies found themselves catastrophically positioned in their DEI and ESG initiatives, earning well-deserved pushback from state attorneys general like Jonathan Skrmetti and James Uthmeier and now facing renewed scrutiny from Trump administration agencies. The underlying statutes did not change, but Corporate America seemed to operate under the delusion that some of their most questionable practices would never be challenged. Maybe they wouldn’t have drifted so far had they been sourcing advice from a more representative sample of lawyers.

Ironically, a number of large firms became litigation targets themselves following the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision, quickly settling rather than defending their own DEI practices. The very firms supposedly protecting corporate clients from liability had become liabilities themselves, unable to see the legal vulnerabilities in their own operations.

Corporate America has the data needed to make informed decisions about legal representation. In-house legal departments should heed this wake-up call and diversify their advisory sources—or risk going down the same path that has already led to costly strategic miscalculations. Smart companies will use Muller’s data to seek more balanced representation before enforcement actions or other litigation catches them completely off guard.

In my next post, I will look at Professor Muller’s findings for the 50 top plaintiffs’ firms.