After President Donald Trump announced a deal with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom on Friday, Brenna Frey decided she had had enough.
Frey, an associate at the firm’s Washington, DC office who said she has worked in Big Law for over a decade, told Business Insider on Sunday it was a “dealbreaker” for her that Skadden chose to preemptively reach an agreement with the administration to avoid punitive executive actions similar to those taken against other law firms like Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie, and WilmerHale, among others.
In recent weeks, Trump has targeted several Big Law firms with executive actions that strip their lawyers of security clearances and order reviews of their government contracts. Some firms, like Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, have fought the orders in court, while others, like Paul Weiss and Skadden, have chosen to sign agreements to avoid the legal headache.
“The deal was announced, and that was it for me,” Frey said, noting that she was “absolutely not considering leaving” prior to Skadden’s decision to provide $100 million in pro bono legal services to causes that Trump supports. The firm also promised it would not “engage in illegal DEI discrimination,” according to a copy of the agreement that Trump posted on Truth Social.
In her resignation announcement posted on LinkedIn, Frey called Skadden’s deal with Trump “a craven attempt to sacrifice the rule of law for self-preservation.”
She told BI she wanted to make her resignation public to signal solidarity with those disappointed or angered by the agreement.
“I know there are people still at the firm who can’t leave for whatever reason, financial reasons, needing to pay back law school loans, the breadwinner for their family,” she said. “I knew that those people can’t speak out, so because I was able to, I felt it was important to make that public.”
In her LinkedIn post, Frey quoted Rachel Cohen, another former Skadden associate who resigned earlier this month in a firm-wide email. Frey said she also tried to send her resignation to all of Skadden’s US firms but found the distribution lists disabled.
Two other Skadden associates told BI that they, too, had tried to send firm-wide emails seeking more information about the deal but found that access to the internal distribution lists had been blocked after Cohen’s resignation.
In her March 20 resignation email to Skadden that she posted on LinkedIn, Cohen said the current situation was not normal. She also circulated an open letter among hundreds of associates at Big Law firms calling on their employers to take a stronger stand against Trump’s executive orders.
Cohen, who worked at the firm’s Chicago office, wrote a response to Frey’s LinkedIn post on Friday, complimenting her decision to “stand for the rule of law.”
“Brenna—you and many others are the reason that I will never be ashamed to say I worked at Skadden Arps, despite leadership’s determination to try to ruin the firm’s name,” Cohen wrote.
Frey said she’s gotten support from some associates within Skadden, as well as from people outside the firm.
“With respect to Big Law more generally, I’m grateful that the world is watching, that clients are watching,” she said. “There are examples of firms out there who have successfully fought back.”
While firms like Skadden and Paul Weiss have inked deals with the president, drawing ire from many within the industry, other firms have chosen to sue in response to Trump’s executive orders.
Jenner & Block and WilmerHale are two of those firms. In both cases, judges approved temporary restraining orders to halt Trump’s executive actions. The judges in both cases expressed concern that the targeted actions threatened the rule of law.
“I hope that they look to the firms who have fought back about against this infringement on the rule of law, rather than the firms who have chosen to acquiesce to the Trump administration’s demands,” Frey said.
