March 16, 2022

Law Students Demand Big Law Stop Serving Russian Clients - Business Insider

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Nearly 200 law students have urged law firms to dump all of their Russian clients.
They asked firms to do more than just close offices in Moscow.
Some law firms have made hundreds of millions of dollars in Russia over the years.

Law students from Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and other top US law schools have signed a letter urging international law firms to completely stop serving Russian clients. They said any firm that hadn't cut ties with the Kremlin and its supporters was a "willful instrument of Moscow's war machine."

The letter came in the wake of announcements by at least 19 law firms based in the US, UK, and Sweden that they would be closing their Moscow offices. The law students who signed the letter said firms should go further and end all business relationships with Russian clients.

"A commitment to 'review' and 'reevaluate' work 'reasonably believed connected' to Putin's regime is woefully inadequate," the students wrote in their letter. "As law students, we are particularly attuned to indefinite language; we know better than anyone our professions' gift for finding loopholes and working within ambiguity."

Law students have been flexing their activism muscles in recent years to try to spur changes in the traditionally hidebound world of law firms. In 2018, the People's Parity Project lobbied law firms — some of them successfully — to stop forcing lawyers to arbitrate employment disputes. And in 2020, a group called Law Students for Climate Accountability began pressuring law firms to stop doing deals for oil and gas companies.

The letter had 163 signatures as of Tuesday afternoon and was signed by people who identified themselves as students at the law schools of New York University, Duke, the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA, among others.

Jackie Schaeffer, a student at Stanford Law School.

It was shared on LinkedIn by Jackie Schaeffer, a law student at Stanford who said she was the daughter of Ukrainian refugees. Schaeffer said the idea for the letter came about when she saw laudatory media coverage of law firms' announcements that they would withdraw from Russia.

"That felt extremely bizarre," she said, "and really lit a fire under me and other students and professors that are involved."

One signer, Ryan Donahue, said he withdrew from a summer associate program at a large law firm after he was unsatisfied with its response to Russia's attack on Ukraine.

More than a week passed after Russian forces pushed into Ukraine on February 24 before foreign law firms began to cut ties with Russia. At least one firm, Norton Rose Fulbright, initially asked its employees to refrain from commenting on new US sanctions, though it later issued a statement expressing "shock" at the "tragic events unfolding in the Ukraine."

Some lawyers and commentators chalked up the delay to legal and ethical obligations. Ethics rules often prohibit a lawyer from dropping a client in the middle of a court case. The student letter calls on law firms that must keep working for Russian clients to donate their profits to Ukrainian relief efforts.

Over the years, some law firms have made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars representing Russia's government, state-owned banks and energy companies, and businesses run by people with government connections.

More than $42 million in fees paid by the Russian government to White & Case, Cleary Gottlieb, and Baker Botts have been disclosed in arbitration awards dating to 2014. Many more firms have done deal work for Russian banks and oil and gas companies, for which fees typically don't become public.

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