Orange Shoe Law Firms? What Exactly Should We Call Biglaw Firms Cutting Deals With Donald Trump?

We’ve called them cowardly and collaborators and capitulators and Trump’s deputies. We’ve characterized their actions as surrendering, bending the knee, and swearing fealty to the administration. We’ve branded them the Order of the Obsequious and bandied about the Deep Mistake Nine for the nerd crowd. We even tabbed them “yellow-bellied” for an 1800s grizzled prospector vibe.

The individual firms earned some new nicknames too. “Paul Wuss” caught fire on social media (sorry, the proper styling is “Paul, Wuss”), but we heard WillkieFear and Cowardalader too.

For the purposes of news coverage, we can and do lean on our thesauruses to keep articles from getting bogged down in convention. Spicing new phrases or nicknames into stories helps keep them fresh. But maybe there’s a value in settling on a stable, catchy moniker — at least for some constituencies.

Mostly, I’m thinking about law school students. When they start signing up for on-campus interviews — to the extent they still exist — what’s the best way to describe the new category of law firm willing to shell out some pro bono payola to avoid having to take Donald Trump to court?

I remember first applying to law firms and being schooled by classmates on “the tobacco firms” that everyone was supposed to avoid. It proved useful to have a handy, descriptive title to work with as we signed up for interviews. Sometimes we forget that law students aren’t necessarily as steeped in firm news as practitioners and it’s essential to develop quick points of reference that can stick in a student’s head.

A reader recently pitched the term “Orange Shoe” — a twist on the traditional “White Shoe” classification — which is absolutely fantastic. But it got me thinking that these naming exercises are more than whimsical rebranding, but a valuable sorting device for young future lawyers trying to wrap their heads around hundreds of firms. They’re talking about White Shoe firms among their friends, why not bootstrap off that classic terminology to capture the essence of prestigious firms willing to sell out rather than stand up for themselves.

After all, if your goal is to one day uphold the rule of law, maybe don’t start your career at a firm agreeing in principle to lend its talents to support the administration rewriting it with a Sharpie. Even if the firms are furiously trying to downplay the scope of the deals… we’ll see what Trump thinks about that. Anyone old enough to remember the Star Wars movies before they started to suck knows exactly how that negotiation is going to go.

And it’s a useful way to think about these firms beyond cowardice and complicity — ooh, there’s another good one! Even if a student wanted to give the firm the benefit of the doubt and doesn’t per se begrudge the firms that they HAD to settle with Trump, “Orange Shoe” as opposed to a more value-laden term conveys a firm that thought its business was so intertwined with staying in line with the administration’s interests that it needed to cave. That means a student might not want to hitch their future to that mix of work in any event.

Or maybe Orange Shoe isn’t the answer. What other names have you heard that you like — either for the category of nine who explicitly agreed to payola deals, the broader category of firms either surrendering or preemptively throwing DEI and pro bono work under the bus to avoid Trump’s attention, or for individual firms involved. Hit us up at tips@abovethelaw.com (don’t worry, you’re anonymous) and don’t forget to tag us on social media if you see a good name in the wild (abovethelaw.com at Bluesky, atlblog on Twitter).

If we get enough of these together, maybe we’ll invite some audience participation to decide which one should become the industry standard.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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