On a chilly evening in January 2017, shortly before the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, a large crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., for an extraordinary celebration. A procession of judges, senators, congressmen, and conservative power brokers trooped up to the top floor of a neoclassical art deco building near the United States Capitol. The eighty-two-year-old edifice—originally the headquarters of the Acacia Life Insurance Company—was designed by the same architects behind the Empire State Building. A pair of limestone griffins, each clutching eggs, guarded the twenty-two wide steps that led to the building’s main entrance on Louisiana Avenue. Green marble columns loomed inside the cavernous lobby. Upstairs, the floors luxuriated under twelve-foot ceilings, and wood-paneled offices and conference rooms, some equipped with fireplaces, afforded breathtaking views of the Capitol dome.
The law firm Jones Day occupied the building. Founded in 1893 in Cleveland, it had grown into one of the planet’s largest legal machines, with thousands of attorneys spread across dozens of offices in the U.S. and overseas. Cleveland had long since faded as a locus of power, which these days resided in Washington. There was no clearer sign of that shift than the men who were being honored this January night: These were the lawyers who were leaving Jones Day to join the new Trump administration, where they would exert tremendous sway over the course of national events.
Jones Day’s leader was a headstrong, bulldog-faced attorney named Steve Brogan. He was a religious man and the son of a New York City cop, and after faith and family, the law firm was his life. Brogan loved Jones Day, and he wielded unfettered power. He controlled who Jones Day hired, how much employees were paid, where the firm opened offices, and even who would succeed him as managing partner. (Technically, there were a pair of committees that could overrule such decisions, but they had never done so.1) Brogan was king—or, as more than a few of his colleagues described him, the godfather.
Brogan very much liked the Acacia. “That is one great building,” he had gushed shortly after signing the lease. (Jones Day beat out the Securities and Exchange Commission, which also had been eyeing the location.)2 Brogan ensconced himself in a suite so palatial that a colleague warned him that it would create the impression that Brogan viewed himself as emperor, not a member of a partnership. Brogan kept the office.
Soon after Brogan took over the firm in 2003, Jones Day had set out to greatly enlarge its ranks of Washington lawyers, in keeping with the firm’s—and the industry’s—governing principle over the past few decades, which boiled down to more lawyers, more offices, more clients, more money, more power.
Thanks to those wonderfully high ceilings, though, there wasn’t space in the Acacia to cram in many more lawyers. In 2004, architects and engineers proposed leveling a neighboring parking garage to make way for a gleaming, twelve-story office annex. It would be connected to the Acacia by a triangular, glass-enclosed atrium and a series of translucent “skywalks” etched with the names of cities in which Jones Day operated.
The plans called for a zoning variance that would allow the new structure to exceed the area’s 110-foot height limit by at least twenty feet. This was when the problems began. Law enforcement agencies, still skittish after 9/11, warned that the roof was so high that it could provide snipers with an ideal nest from which to pick off senators. The building’s developers didn’t deny that gunmen would have a clear line of sight onto the Capitol grounds; instead, they pointed out that there were plenty of other nearby sites that also would be suitable for assassination attempts. This was a less-than-persuasive argument—surely, creating additional platforms for snipers was undesirable, even if other options existed—but D.C. zoning bodies approved the plans.3
Yet the Capitol Police kept pressing their case. They appealed to individual senators who, the cops emphasized, were the ones who might find themselves in the crosshairs of a rifleman perched on the roof of this sleek new mini-skyscraper. Not surprisingly, senators didn’t like the sound of that. In June 2005 the chamber approved a measure that essentially blocked the building’s construction.4
Jones Day’s lawyers thought this was an overreaction. “We were told at the time that there were only two sharpshooters in the entire U.S. military who were capable of making that shot,” Ray Wiacek, a Jones Day partner who was responsible for handling the firm’s leases, told me. (He added that Jones Day didn’t plan to lease the top floors of the new building and therefore “had no dog in this fight.” The building’s developers, however, cited Jones Day’s desire for more space as the reason for the requested zoning variance.) In any case, the developers were outflanked and had to back down. The proposed building’s top floors were lopped off.
Construction finally got underway in 2008, and the finished campus became an appealing synthesis of old and new. Exposed yellow piping accented the stone and steel. All-glass elevators glided through the skylit atrium. Yet the delayed and downsized building—a product of a defeat at the hands of the political establishment—was a diminished monument to its primary occupant.
Over the next decade, Jones Day underwent a remarkable metamorphosis that ensured it would no longer lurk on the outside of that establishment, peering in. Soon, the firm wasn’t only bigger, though it was that. It wasn’t only richer, though it was that, too. It was more powerful, especially where it mattered most: in Washington.
Jones Day had enmeshed itself in the fabric of the capital’s conservative firmament. The law firm had always leaned Republican. But lately it had become a champion of right-wing politics, organizing legal challenges to Obama’s health care program, white-collar prosecutions, government regulations, and voting rights laws. Then came the 2016 presidential election. Jones Day took a gamble by representing Trump, helping the underdog build credibility in Republican circles and even using the law firm’s majestic building as a campaign prop. The mastermind was Don McGahn, a shaggy-haired, guitar-playing Jones Day lawyer who, as the Trump team’s lead outside counselor, took on a public role advising and traveling with the inflammatory politician.
That was why the well-heeled crowd was gathered on the top floor of Jones Day’s offices on this January evening. The venue was an event space whose floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the Capitol and opened onto a manicured roof terrace. In summer, it was a verdant landscape of plush lawns and colorful bushes and a garden that yielded lettuce, radishes, peppers, and carrots. In winter the terrace was beige and lifeless, but the views were still amazing—so much so that CBS News had received Jones Day’s blessing to create a permanent broadcast studio up there, giving its anchors an impressive backdrop as they covered events like a State of the Union address or a presidential inauguration. The latter would occur in just a few days.
This night, hundreds of lawyers and lawmakers and dignitaries milled about the chilly veranda and the adjoining conference area. They had gathered to toast the large landing party that Jones Day was dispatching to get the Trump administration up and running. By Brogan’s count, a dozen of his lawyers had lined up prominent jobs in the White House, Justice Department, and other federal agencies. There would be many more.
It was an unparalleled concentration of a single firm’s lawyers inside a new administration, and it would position Jones Day to aid its corporate clients and advance the political agenda of men like Brogan. Leading the pack was McGahn, who would serve as Trump’s White House counsel. Prior to helping elect Trump, his claim to fame had been the weakening of regulations restricting outside spending on political campaigns. Now McGahn was plotting something bolder: neutering the federal bureaucracy and remaking the judiciary. A fortunate handful of Jones Day attorneys would soon score lifetime appointments to the federal bench.
As the illuminated Capitol glowed in the night sky, the lawyers and politicians ate and drank and congratulated each other. Then it was time for speeches. McGahn, touched that Jones Day was throwing him a reception,5 thanked the firm for hiring him less than three years earlier and for its fearlessness in representing a polarizing campaign. His longtime colleague and onetime mentor, Ben Ginsberg, had flown in on a red-eye for the event, and he noted fondly how McGahn had first arrived in Washington “with long hair and a guitar.” Brogan, a big smile plastered on his ruddy face, declared how proud he was of McGahn and his gang, who were elevating Jones Day’s stature as a go-to political law firm.
The crowd that evening was festive and a little tipsy. It was mostly Republican, but a handful of prominent Democrats, including Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar and Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell6, showed up, too. The event marked the arrival of this once-obscure law firm as a true power player.
For more than three years after that rooftop party, Jones Day flew mostly under the radar, even as it helped Trump sidestep Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election and as it helped its corporate clients get their way in the capital. Then, in the summer of 2020, people inside and outside Jones Day began sounding urgent alarms about its work for Trump and his allies. Even before Election Day, the firm had been laying the legal groundwork for Republicans to question the legitimacy of the results in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. Sure enough, Trump lost the election, and the subversion of democracy through a barrage of litigation became the president’s best hope of clinging to power.
In a flash, Jones Day became a symbol of a well-orchestrated assault on the integrity of the American electoral system. Protesters chanted outside the firm’s offices in New York and Washington. In San Francisco, where Jones Day had offices in a downtown skyscraper that was partly owned by Trump, activists painted a street mural depicting the firm stealing votes and demanded that it cease and desist. Inside Jones Day, angry partners and associates began complaining—a grave breach of decorum at a law firm where power was vested almost entirely in a single man.
The firm’s work for the Trump campaign was what attracted scrutiny, but what if the general public knew what else was going on inside Jones Day—or, for that matter, any other elite international law firm? Here was a corner of the business world that, despite its size, money, and clout, had mostly escaped outside attention, allowing the legal industry to make the planet a more dangerous, less just place under the guise of providing trusted legal counsel.
Around the time that Jones Day’s lawyers were trying to make it harder for mail-in ballots to count in Pennsylvania, a group of the firm’s partners was helping the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds. The goal was to defang regulations governing the marketing of cigarettes. The lawyers insisted in court that government-mandated health warnings on cigarette packs violated tobacco companies’ First Amendment rights. Elsewhere, Jones Day’s lawyers were threatening municipalities that dared to discourage the sale or advertising of tobacco products.
Around the same time that these Jones Day lawyers were seeking to preserve a tobacco company’s rights to express itself, another team was helping Walmart, whose pharmacies for years had been dishing out opioids with abandon. Before Covid-19, the epidemic caused by the spread of the highly addictive painkillers was the foremost public-health crisis facing America. Jones Day trotted out a variety of creative defenses—and tapped its alumni network inside the Trump administration—to shield Walmart from liability for the havoc it had helped wreak.
There was more. Jones Day was working for the Catholic Church as it tried to minimize the extent of its sexual-abuse scandals. And for Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, as it sought to protect its right to make and market its dangerous drug. And for Abbott Laboratories, as it dodged responsibility for babies being brain damaged after consuming the company’s powdered formula. And for Fox News, as it waged war against employees who were the victims of sexual harassment or worse. And for Russian oligarchs as their conglomerates sought to expand internationally. And for Johnson & Johnson as it deployed a novel legal strategy to avoid payouts to cancer victims. And for a wide variety of companies that were trying to smash labor unions or prevent them from forming in the first place.
The point is not that Jones Day is uniquely terrible. It is not. Nor is the law firm the country’s largest (though it is right up there) or most profitable (though it generates more than $2 billion a year in revenue). It is not an evil institution. Many of its more than 2,500 lawyers are consummate professionals, dedicated to zealously representing clients within the bounds of legal ethics. Jones Day prides itself on a culture of collaboration, in contrast to the backstabbing endemic to many of its rivals. And hundreds of Jones Day’s lawyers—and the firm itself—have donated countless hours of lifesaving work for refugees and others desperately in need of legal assistance.
Even so, Jones Day’s arc—from its founding in Cleveland to its current status as a global colossus—is a powerful encapsulation of the changes that have swept the legal industry in recent decades. Today, Jones Day and many of its peers have become enablers of the business world’s worst misbehavior. Increasingly, that work bleeds into the political realm—as Jones Day’s embrace of Donald Trump vividly shows.
For a long time, law firms weren’t very big or profit crazed or power hungry. While some lawyers and scholars had long decried their profession’s creeping commercialization, bar associations had responded to those concerns by erecting an interlocking network of firewalls to keep capitalism at bay. Lawyers didn’t regard themselves as being in business; they were officers of the court, part of a centuries-old tradition that demanded allegiance to a code of ethics and honor. To be clear, this was no utopia. Plenty of lawyers crossed lines, and some legends of the bar, like the Supreme Court orator Daniel Webster, made their livings helping to carve out expansive rights for powerful companies.7 In addition, the legal profession was the nearly exclusive province of white men, who at times used their power for racist and sexist ends.
But most lawyers viewed their occupation as public spirited. They often turned down unsavory clients and assignments, because they and their firms didn’t face an imperative to grow. That began to change in the late 1970s, thanks to a series of pivotal but long-forgotten events. First, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that law firms were businesses, with the right to advertise their services. Today that seems obvious—and not unreasonable—but at the time it represented radical thinking for the legal profession.
Then, in 1979, came the debut of a monthly magazine called the American Lawyer. Law firms up until that point had treated their work—especially their inner operations and finances—like state secrets. The American Lawyer’s mission was to reveal those secrets and to cover the industry like other outlets did Hollywood or the NBA. Soon, lawyers could follow the ups and downs of their rivals and decide where to work based on how much they were likely to earn.
These dual developments unshackled the staid industry. An arms race ensued—for better lawyers, for more lucrative assignments, for prestige, for power. Growth begat growth. The more firms hired, the more their costs went up, which meant more revenue was needed. The simplest solution was to take on new clients or cases. It was not a coincidence that, just as Jones Day was starting out in what would become an international gold rush, it cast its lot with an increasingly risqué roster of clients, including Big Tobacco.
Thanks in part to the legal industry’s private ownership, not to mention its practitioners’ massaging of the media, law firms have long avoided much accountability for their actions. One way they have deflected attention is by espousing the largely self-serving notion that it is the patriotic duty of American lawyers to extend blind, everlasting loyalty to even their most monstrous corporate clients.
It is true, of course, that all accused criminals have the right to competent counsel. But the legal industry has warped this concept into something else entirely. Law firms and their leaders peddle the fiction that everyone—including, importantly, all companies—has the right to the best lawyers, in all situations and at all times. The corollary: Once a corporation becomes a client, the law firm is stuck, because ditching clients who find themselves in trouble is an abrogation of the lawyer’s sacred vow.
These arguments are pocked with holes. While down-on-their-luck humans deserve access to high-quality legal services (which they often don’t get, because so many of the best lawyers are lured to giant law firms, which overwhelmingly represent corporations), the same is not automatically true of companies or other institutions. The Sixth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the rights of the accused in a criminal trial “to have the assistance of counsel for his defence.” It says nothing about civil cases, much less about out-of-court legal services like helping companies skirt regulations or silence whistleblowers or dodge taxes. Almost by definition, the right to counsel is geared toward protecting the poor and weak, not the rich and strong, who can fend for themselves. Law firms don’t even really believe in the principle that they often invoke; when it suits them, they trumpet their decisions to avoid impolitic work.
The problem is that it rarely suits them. It is profitable for lawyers and their firms to stand by giant companies—especially since abandoning them would send an unmistakable signal that other rich and powerful clients should look for more pliant counselors, of which there are plenty. Citing the constitutional right to counsel is a convenient way for giant firms to rationalize this representation and to preempt criticism—or even scrutiny—of whom elite lawyers serve and how they serve them.
By the dying days of the Trump presidency, with democracy hanging by a thread, the costs of this era of unaccountability were becoming clear. Almost exactly four years after the crowd had gathered on Jones Day’s top floor to celebrate its lawyers’ migration into the Trump administration, a much larger crowd assembled nearby. If anyone had been on Jones Day’s rooftop on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, they would have enjoyed a splendid view of a violent mob storming the Capitol—the predictable culmination of a president whom Jones Day had helped elect, an administration the firm’s lawyers had helped run, and an election whose integrity the firm had helped erode.