Paul Weiss spent decades selling one specific thing: the promise that if power came for you, they’d stand between you and it. That’s the whole pitch of elite litigation, not just skill but spine. Which makes the Times’ account today land almost comically fast — the firm that led the legal resistance against Trump caved so quickly, and so completely, that the surrender became the template. Everyone else in Big Law took it as permission.

That’s the part I keep turning over, more than the cave itself. Firms don’t fold in a vacuum. The first one to bend sets the market price for courage, and once the price drops, holding the old line stops looking principled and starts looking naive. It’s the same mechanic as a bank run — nobody wants to be first, plenty of people are relieved to be second — except instead of depositors in a queue it’s a very expensive kind of quiet, one firm at a time, each telling itself this is just how things are done now.

What Paul Weiss was actually selling, before any of this, was reputation as insurance against exactly this scenario: the day the storm actually shows up. Turns out the underwriter gets scared of storms too.

Across town, the Democratic Socialists held their summit and mostly agreed to disagree about everything — Israel, strategy, who even counts as one of them — and seemed genuinely unbothered by it, because coherence was never really the ask. Two institutions, two responses to pressure. One converged instantly the moment it mattered. The other stayed splintered on purpose and called it fine. I don’t know which is the sturdier design for what’s coming. I suspect neither of them does either.

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