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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30006 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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A third year Skadden associate sent out a firm-wide - including overseas offices in Europe and Asia - email with her "conditional" resignation, where she laid out her terms not to quit. The terms were basically to fight Trump better. She also posted the email on her LinkedIn.

A few hours later, she could no longer access her firm email - it appears Skadden accepted her resignation. She is now making news appearances talking about #resisting in the face of authoritarianism. It's unclear how many firms want a corporate associate that desires to "fight" so badly - in the few firms interested in disrupting client work for challenging the administration, social justice is reserved for the litigators.

Ultimately, all BigLaw is soulless, putting profits over justice. It's about dealwork and defense, not upholding the law itself - that's more plaintiff-side work that very few BigLaw firms can swing litigating. Not many clients wants to hire a law firm that paints a target on their back, not when NGOs and civil rights firms exist - there are more appropriate "mechanisms" in the legal world to fight these fights, and those mechanisms are in play. It is not the duty, nor the skill set, of BigLaw.

I admire her confidence that the world-wide firm would care about a junior leveraged finance associate's opinion regarding the rule of law in the United States. Posting an internal email on her LinkedIn also feels concerning from a disclosure perspective - associates have been fired for filming tiktoks in their offices before because of the risk of showing client materials.

She has previously circulated an anonymous statement "signed" by BigLaw associates listing their firm name and class year, because she believed it would pressure BigLaw firms into Doing Something.

It seems that statement culture is no longer a tool of the culture war - firms don't really seem to care. Being willing to resign is a step in the right direction, I think, although I wonder if she really thought she would be considered so valuable to the firm that they would meet her conditions. She seems to truly believe that she Accomplished Something, and I wonder if that's a residual impact of the COVID corporate social justice era, in which empowering employees to Defend The Current Thing took off.

I'm waiting to see if she's going to try to file a workplace retaliation claim or anything crazy for Skadden accepting her resignation, because that kind of feels like the vibe of things. Realistically, I know that this is going to be like when random tech workers quit over how their employers "handled" Palestine - it will be swept under the rug and forgotten about.

How do you know this?

I took this opportunity to do some media bias comparisons on how this story is being reported. There's a combination of editorializing, credulous repetition of claims without explicitly editorializing, and some neutral reporting (Kudos to Global Legal Post which was the best on this). I found no Right-leaning sources reporting on this story. This is typical of news that has partisan slant: most of the bias shows up in what stories get reported, not how they're reported.

GroundNews summary and news source comparison: Skadden Associate Resigns Over Big Law's Tepid Response to Trump Pressure

Business Insider, considered "leans Left", quotes the associate extensively without skepticism, but doesn't editorialize in the article itself:

She asked her colleagues to sign an open letter from law firm associates condemning Trump's "all-out attack aimed at dismantling rule-of-law norms."

Law.com, considered Center, editorializes a bit:

Rachel Cohen, the third-year finance associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who'd been one of the rare voices in Big Law to attach her name to criticism of firms' quiescence in the face of an unprecedented assault from the Trump administration, had a sharp reaction to the deal Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison negotiated with the president on Thursday.

And Above the Law unabashedly editorializes:

One brave Biglaw associate has quite frankly had enough of this, and she’s once again sounding off — not just before her firm, but before the entire legal profession — to make clear just how important it is not to bow down before the Trump administration.

Other sources I found through Web search:

  1. Mother Jones (Left)
  2. Global Legal Post) (appears Center and quite helpfully includes context like Democrat-leaning Paul Weiss)
  3. PBS (Lean Left according to GroundNews) has an interview with the associate. The summary uses the phrase "latest in a series" and the interviewer doesn't challenge wild statements like I think that my concern is that the coup that is ongoing will be done.
  4. New Republic (Left)
  5. AOL (Lean Left)

It's all over the fake news if you google it, though it wouldn't have hurt for OP to throw in some links

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