After President Donald Trump announced an agreement with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom on Friday, Brenna Frey decided that she had enough.
Frey, a partner at the Washington office office, DC, who said that she has been working in Big Law for more than a decade, told Business Insider on Sunday that it was a “Dealbreaker” for her that Skadden had chosen to prevent an agreement with the administration to avoid punitive executive actions similar to other avocado firms like Paul Weiss, Perkins Cooe and Wilmerhale, among others.
In recent weeks, Trump has targeted several large law firms with executive actions that deploy their lawyers for security authorizations and order examinations of their government contracts. Some companies, such as Jenner & Block and Wilmerhale, fought the orders in court, while others, like Paul Weiss and Skadden, have chosen to sign agreements to avoid legal headaches.
“The agreement was announced, and that’s it for me,” said Frey, noting that she “absolutely did not plan to leave” before Skadden’s decision to provide $ 100 million in Pro Bono legal services to cause Trump to support. The cabinet also promised that he would not “engage in illegal dei discrimination”, according to a copy of the agreement that Trump published on Truth Social.
In his announcement as a resignation published on LinkedIn, Frey described Trump’s Skadden’s agreement “an attempt to sacrifice the rule of law for self-preservation”.
She told Bi that she wanted to make her resignation public to report solidarity with those disappointed or angry by the agreement.
“I know that there are still people in the office who cannot leave for any reason, financial reasons, who need to reimburse loans from the Faculty of Law, their family support for the family,” she said. “I knew that these people cannot express themselves, so because I was able to do it, I felt it was important to make it public.”
In his article LinkedIn, Frey quoted Rachel Cohen, another former Skadden partner who resigned earlier this month in an email on the scale of the company. Frey said she had also tried to resign to all American skadden companies, but found the distribution lists disabled.
Two other Skadden partners told BI that they had also tried to send emails to the company’s scale by looking for more information on the agreement, but found that access to internal distribution lists was blocked after Cohen’s resignation.
In her resignation email on March 20 in Skadden that she published on LinkedIn, Cohen said the current situation was not normal. She also broadcast an open letter from hundreds of partners in large law firms calling for their employers to take a stronger position against Trump’s decrees.
Cohen, who worked at the office of the Chicago cabinet, wrote a response to the Frey’s LinkedIn Post on Friday, complimating his decision to “defend the rule of law”.
“Brenna – You and many others are the reason why I will never be ashamed to say that I worked at Skadden Arps, despite the determination of leadership to try to ruin the name of the company,” wrote Cohen.
Frey said that she had obtained the support of certain Skadden partners, as well as people outside the company.
“Regarding the great law in general, I am grateful that the world is watching, that customers watch,” she said. “There are examples of companies that have managed to resume.”
While companies like Skadden and Paul Weiss have agreements with the president, pulling the anger of many in the industry, Other companies have chosen to continue in response to Trump’s decrees.
Jenner & Block and Wilmerhale are two of these companies. In both cases, the judges approved temporary ban prescriptions to stop Trump’s executive actions. The judges in both cases expressed their concern that targeted actions threatened the rule of law.
“I hope they turn to companies that retaliated against this violation of the rule of law, rather than the companies that have chosen to acquiesce the requests of the Trump administration,” said Frey.
businessinsider
