A week and a half after the election, Kevyn Orr convened back-to-back videoconference calls for Jones Day’s lawyers in Washington. The son of a teacher-turned-school-superintendent (mom) and a teacher-turned-minister (dad),1 Orr had joined Jones Day in 2001 after years of serving as a lawyer for various arms of the federal government. He was impressed by the firm’s “stellar reputation for integrity and superior legal work.”2 Orr was friendly and charismatic and “very conscientious about being an attorney of color in a big law firm,” one of his former colleagues, Ritu Cooper, told me. He went out of his way to mentor young lawyers and “has a way of making everyone feel special and important.”
For years, Orr had been privately grumbling to colleagues about his distaste for the work that the D.C. office—of which he was ostensibly in charge—was performing for Trump. It was more than disliking Trump’s politics. Orr told other lawyers that he feared that Jones Day was debasing itself through its close ties to an administration that had little interest in the rule of law. Orr loved Jones Day, and he admired Brogan, and he worried that the stain on the firm’s reputation could be dark and indelible.
Now his fears were being realized. In the days after the election, as Trump made clear that he would not be going quietly, that he would resort to dangerous tactics to cling to power, the outside world began waking up to the role that Jones Day had played for the past five years in getting Trump into office and keeping him there. And with the action in Pennsylvania, Jones Day was arming Trump with ammunition to stop the vote-counting and preserve his fast-shrinking lead.
In San Francisco, activists on November 6 created a 240-foot mural on the street outside Jones Day’s offices. On a rust-colored backdrop, the words “Jones Day: Hands Off Our Ballots” were painted in white. The silhouette of a hand reached across the letter “H,” as if to steal a ballot.
A networking organization for young lawyers called on law students not to take jobs at Jones Day. A group called Rise and Resist held a protest outside the firm’s New York office.3 At the University of Michigan School of Law (Orr’s alma mater), a group of students pledged not to interview at Jones Day. A Stanford Law professor and leading legal ethicist said she would warn students about working for the firm.4
In Texas, Lizanne Thomas, the partner in charge of the southeastern region for Jones Day and the head of its corporate governance practice, received emails from partners complaining that their firm was demeaning itself. (Thomas told me that she had “always been comfortable with our firm’s principled stand in representing unpopular or controversial clients.”) The general counsel of a company in Texas wrote to his point of contact at Jones Day that he was deeply disappointed in the firm. Another partner got a slightly apologetic note from a longtime client, who said he was urging people he knew at other Jones Day clients to protest to the firm about its work for Trump. The partner forwarded the email to Orr.
Even with everyone working from home, Orr could feel the temperature rising. It was getting to the point where a trusted leader could no longer pretend that he didn’t know how his troops were feeling. Orr’s instinct was to address this head-on. As it turned out, he’d already scheduled a partners’ meeting for Thursday, November 12. Before Covid, Orr would invite the Washington partners for lunch at least once a month. He’d kept it up, virtually, during the pandemic. The ostensible purpose of this particular meeting, held over the digital-conferencing platform Webex, was for Orr to nudge partners to nudge their clients to pay their bills. The year was ending, and it was important that all accounts get settled so that the office would hit its budget target.
After Orr reminded his colleagues about money, and after he gave an update on recruitment and business development, Orr said he’d like to address the Trump controversy. He got as far as asserting that Jones Day was not trying to overturn the election, that it was litigating a legitimate constitutional issue. Then the normally staid meeting disintegrated. That’s a semantic distinction! one partner angrily interjected. You’re drawing way too fine a line. The call intensified, lawyers drawing emotional energy from each previous speaker. A number of partners declared that they were so upset that they were considering quitting. Julie McEvoy—who’d held a senior role in the Obama Justice Department—said she’d joined Jones Day a quarter century earlier in part because it wasn’t affiliated with a particular political party. Those days were gone, she noted; this no longer felt like the place she’d picked to spend the bulk of her career. She told her colleagues that she “wanted to speak up because the firm’s identity seemed to be at a crossroads, and it was not clear which way we were headed,” as she put it to me a year later.
At one point, Orr tried to turn the tables by accusing Jones Day’s rivals of whipping up the controversy around its work on the Pennsylvania lawsuit. Partners could see each other rolling their eyes. When Orr insisted that the firm couldn’t abruptly ditch a client, partners protested that neither could the firm wantonly threaten the rule of law.
It was an extraordinary uprising—especially at a place like Jones Day, whose culture under Steve Brogan rewarded deference. There was “more blowback than I’ve ever heard” at a Jones Day meeting, one participant told me. Whining was supposed to be off-limits; flagrantly challenging authority like this would normally be a recipe for getting fired. Now, though, a bunch of partners seemed willing to take that risk.
Among those who spoke up was Sparkle Sooknanan, one of the firm’s young stars. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, she had set out to New York at age sixteen to attend college and then law school, working full-time at night to pay her way. After graduating she landed jobs at the Justice Department and then as a clerk for a series of federal judges, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who became her most cherished mentor.5 Sooknanan joined Jones Day in 2014 and became a partner at the beginning of 2020 at age thirty-six. She was winning cases and earning professional plaudits, but her heart lay in using the law to pursue justice.
Now, on the video call, Sooknanan’s voice trembled as she decried Jones Day’s work in Pennsylvania. “This lawsuit was brought for no other reason than to deprive poor people of the right to vote,” she said. Most of the partners’ lines were muted, and Sooknanan’s remarks were greeted with silence.
For all the anger on the partners’ call, the associates in Jones Day’s D.C. office were even more restive. The day after the Webex meeting, they were invited to participate in their own video meeting with Orr.
When the gathering got underway, it looked like most of the office was online, participants’ faces compressed into tiny squares to squeeze into the on-screen grid. Orr spent about fifteen minutes reciting corporate boilerplate: It’s our job to take hard clients—remember Art Modell!—and we don’t abandon them midstream. (As Orr put it to me, “Our strongest cultural norm perhaps is the resolute belief that we will not yield in our commitment to our clients even though some on the outside may find those representations objectionable or even offensive.”) As Orr finished, a lawyer named Robin Overby spoke up. “Kevyn, are you taking questions?” she asked.
“No,” Orr replied. “I’ll take them seriatim.” It was a bit of Latin legalese: People could ask him questions privately, one by one. The call ended.
This was not what Overby had expected. Given Orr’s reputation as a listener, she and others had figured there would be an opportunity to ask questions or maybe even vent a little. After consulting with colleagues, she and another associate, Parker Rider-Longmaid, had drafted a statement that they’d hoped to read aloud on the call. But they didn’t get the chance.
Slim and sandy-haired, Rider-Longmaid had an idealistic streak. He’d spent nearly two years in Teach for America as an eighth-grade math and science teacher in Philadelphia.6 Now, as a lawyer, he had a promising career in front of him. He’d clerked on the Supreme Court for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Then he was lured to Jones Day and its six-figure signing bonuses. He had a reputation as a reserved, careful lawyer, a bit of a nerd, the last guy to rock the boat. But shortly after Orr ended the meeting, Rider-Longmaid did something unexpected. He sent an email to everyone in Jones Day’s Washington office. It was the statement that he and Overby had hoped to read aloud.
“We dissent,” it began.
The question, Rider-Longmaid wrote, was not whether the Pennsylvania case did or did not have technical legal merit. That was beside the point.
I believe the question is whether this firm should lend its prestige and credibility to the project of an administration bent on undermining our democracy and our rule of law.
Make no mistake. From the outset, this petition [the Pennsylvania litigation] was designed to suppress the vote, to ensure that fewer of our fellow Americans’ voices would be heard, in the midst of a global pandemic like we have never seen in our lifetimes.
And now, it is being weaponized to threaten our generations-long tradition in this country of peaceful and democratic transition of power.
I believe that our society should strive to become a more just and inclusive representative democracy. And this petition, and the project to which it lends our collective prestige, stands firmly in the way of that ideal.
We as lawyers choose our clients and our causes. We choose what we stand for. And this project, I submit, should not be one of those things.
As an American, I am today deeply disappointed in this firm. I do not accept as simply unpopular what is profoundly undemocratic. We are better than this. And yesterday should be no excuse for tomorrow.
We dissent.
A couple of months later, shortly after Joe Biden was sworn in as the forty-sixth president, a memo went out to Jones Day’s lawyers. It announced the firm’s latest comings and goings. “The following lawyers are leaving the Firm,” the memo said.7 There were six lawyers on the list—including Sparkle Sooknanan and Parker Rider-Longmaid. “We wish you all the best!”