The New York Times has a long and interesting article about how the law firm Paul Weiss, a “progressive stalwart,” meekly surrendered to Donald Trump’s “retribution campaign” against it, even as other law firms facing similar executive orders “won quick injunctions from incensed judges.” I encourage you to read the whole article. I will limit myself here to a few nuggets that illustrate what “diversity” means to progressives:
1. Brad Karp, Paul Weiss’s chairman, encountered intense criticism from the Left when its new class of partners in 2019 consisted of “11 white men and one white woman”:
Nearly 200 legal officers of major corporations — including Heineken USA and Booz Allen Hamilton — warned Mr. Karp in a letter that they would take their business elsewhere if Paul Weiss failed “to reflect the diversity of the legal community.”
Privately, Mr. Karp was irate that the firm’s values were being questioned. Publicly, he was contrite.
“I wish I could be Superman and fly backward and make time go back and make sure that we had special individualized mentoring for every single female associate and associate of color,” Mr. Karp said at the time. “But we didn’t do that. And we’ve learned very valuable lessons.”
So Paul Weiss was delighted to be able to include in the next year’s partner class “a perfect candidate … who seemingly embodied everything Paul Weiss valued.”
Believe it or not, this “perfect candidate” who would remedy the utter whiteness of its previous partner class and redeem Paul Weiss in the eyes of general counsels of major corporations was … another white attorney. But this time a white attorney who had the incredible bonus of being nonbinary. So racial and ethnic minorities and their proponents in general-counsel offices can take comfort in Paul Weiss’s commitment to the broader goal of diversity.
2. Here’s another sign of Paul Weiss’s oh-so-one-sided commitment to diversity:
In 2019, firm leaders looking to hire a high-powered litigator identified a Washington lawyer, according to one current and two former Paul Weiss partners. But an impassioned debate followed after Paul Weiss lawyers learned he had done legal work for groups that opposed abortion, and he was not hired.
3. Karp’s own commitment to diversity extended to enthusiastically advising Jeffrey Epstein “on a legal filing responding to some of the women who had accused Mr. Epstein of abusing them as minors”:
“The draft motion is in great shape. It’s overwhelmingly persuasive. Truly,” Mr. Karp wrote to Mr. Epstein. “I particularly liked the argument that the ‘victims’ lied [sic] in wait and sat on their rights for their strategic advantage, knowing you were in prison, before they came forward,” Mr. Karp added.
(That’s my “sic.” NYT editors, like Karp, evidently don’t know what third-graders used to learn: the past tense of lie—in the sense here of resting flat—is lay.)
Karp, I’ll note, did get in trouble with his partners for misrepresenting his relationship with Epstein.