Since late March, for several hours nearly every weekday, Olga Hartwell has quietly stood outside the UBS building at 1285 Sixth Avenue, headquarters of the law firm Paul Weiss, with signs that say things like “Paul Weiss Lawyers, Please Stand Up for the Rule of Law.” Often she is accompanied by her husband, Chris Hartwell, who has his own signs. In recent weeks, the Hartwells — she is in her 60s, and he in his 70s — have been joined by several others drawn to their cause, which ideally would have the firm reconsider its capitulation to the Trump administration.
There are 17 among them and they divvy up the week to ensure that someone is more or less always outside. Lawyers, bankers, young Midtown office workers, students, security guards and homeless people have all approached them to ask questions, or argue, or offer support or buy them coffee. Ms. Hartwell said she was once approached by someone at UBS, a veteran who told her that what the government was doing now was not what he had fought for. Contacted about Ms. Hartwell’s effort, a representative for Paul Weiss did not respond.
Two months ago, the law firm agreed to perform $40 million worth of pro bono work for causes advanced by the White House in order to prevent the administration from barring its lawyers from entering federal buildings. This would have effectively prevented the firm from representing any clients in criminal or civil cases involving the federal government. In his March 14 letter outlining his issue with Paul Weiss, President Trump singled out “unethical attorney Mark Pomerantz,” who had left the firm to join the Manhattan district attorney’s office and oversee its investigation of Mr. Trump, “solely to manufacture a prosecution against me.” The backlash against Paul Weiss in legal and business circles has been tremendous.
In a letter to The New York Times, Sally Pollak, a grandaugther of Louis S. Weiss, a founding partner of the firm, and the daughter of a federal judge and constitutional scholar who briefly worked there, wrote that her forebears would have been “horrified” by the firm’s response and “might have even called the $40 million deal a payoff.” In a letter to Paul Weiss staff members, its chairman, Brad S. Karp, defended the decision, arguing that the firm, where senior partners make up to $20 million a year, “would have been easily destroyed otherwise.”
Ms. Hartwell does not see it that way; greed, in her view, is the real problem, an apparent refusal to consider making less. “Courage is obviously hard,” she said. Serene and thoughtful in her presentation, her mode of resistance does not involve rhyming chants, drums or screaming. An Upper West Sider who knit the hat she wears on cold days, she is not reducible to whatever cliché might follow from that. Until very recently, she had never protested much of anything.
The entirety of her career was, in fact, spent in elite law circles, first as a partner at Covington & Burling, another prominent firm, and one that has resisted the Trump administration’s incursions. For a decade, she worked out of Covington’s London office, advising American corporate clients on international tax strategy. “I love tax law,” she told me, not facetiously, over coffee one morning after 90 minutes of standing on Sixth Avenue. Following her time at Covington, she went to work for GE Capital, the conglomerate’s commercial lending operation, to run its tax division.
