Servants of the Damned

 

David Enrich, “Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Trump, and the Corruption of Justice,” Harper Large Print, 2022, 481 pp..

The author is the New York Times’s Business Investigator.   This book exposes the power wielded by the world’s largest law firms.  Enrich mostly follows the firm that represented the Trump campaign and much of the Fortune 500, which serve as a powerful example of the changes that have swept the legal industry in recent decades.

Since 2016, the law firm Jones Day has been in the spotlight for representing Donald Trump and his campaigns (and now his PACs)—and for the fleet of Jones Day attorneys who joined Trump’s administration, including White House Counsel Don McGahn. Jones Day helped Trump fend off the Mueller investigation; challenged Obamacare; defended Trump’s Muslim ban and border policies; and handled Trump’s judicial nominations. Jones Day even laid some of the legal groundwork for Trump to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

But the Trump work is only one chapter in the firm’s checkered history. Jones Day, like many of its peers, have become highly effective enablers of the business world’s worst misbehavior. The firm has for decades represented Big Tobacco in its fight to avoid liability for its products. Jones Day worked tirelessly for the Catholic Church as it tried to minimize its sexual-abuse scandals. And for Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, as it sought to protect its right to make and market its dangerously addictive drug. And for Fox News as it waged war against employees who were the victims of sexual harassment and retaliation. And for Russian oligarchs as their companies sought to expand internationally.

My Notes:

Pg. 12f:  In the late 1970s lawyers began to turn from the idea of law as a profession to law as a business.  The US Supreme Court ruled that law firms were businesses, with the right to advertise their services. 

Pg. 50f:  In 1974 Scalia began running the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.  In 1982, Reagan nominated Scalia to the powerful D.C Circuit court and then in 1986 to the Supreme Court.

P. 87:  The legal industry size exploded, firms with more than fifty lawyers doubled between 1985 and 1998.  In the mid-1980s, no law firm had more than one thousand lawyers.  A decade later, seventeen did.  The industry—with dozens of firms raking at least a billion dollars a year in revenue—soon rivaled the auto sector in economic value. 

Pg. 188:  By the mid-1980s the arrival of clients like RJR and Lincoln Savings pushed the staid midwestern firm of Jones Day into an aggressive new phase.  The dawn of the Brogan era as the managing partner hastened the firm’s transformation into a take-no-prisoners juggernaut.

Pg. 266:  Everyone, the argument goes, has the right to counsel.  But the work of elite lawyers and law firms has less and less to do with courtroom representation  Instead, it is geared toward helping clients sidestep regulations, control the media, whitewash their reputations, dodge taxes, and hide their money—tasks that don’t fit under even the most expansive definition of work to which clients are constitutionally or ethically entitled.

Pg. 349:  Mitch McConnel explained years later that the list of judges Jones Day provided and Trump agreed to became the single biggest issue bringing Republicans in line behind Trump.

Pg. 457:  Jones Day lawyers coached witnesses in the Abbott Laboratories depositions, encourage and paid for $10,000 campaign contributions on Charles Keating’s behalf, hurled ethical allegations to help Walmart, threated a small Massachusetts town that dared challenge Big Tobacco.  The law had long ago ceased to serve as a vehicle for achieving justice, for assuring fairness.  It had become something to exploit.