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Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gaelin. Today, I'm joined by award winning journalist David Enrich, the business investigations editor at the New York Times.

He was a reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal, spending time in both New York and London. His latest book is Servants of the Damned.

Giant law firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice, which is available wherever fine books are sold. And let me tell you is absolutely worth the read.

Today he's coming to us from just north of New York City. Dave, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

So I'm reading this. I'm reading electronically. So I have my little highlight thing I do. And I think I counted at least half a dozen examples of there like, well, everybody deserves representation regardless of how people feel about our clients publicly, right?

Or at any given time in politics or publicity or whatever. And it seems like the sort of get out of jail free card, so to speak, for a lot of these big law firms, which in this book admittedly focuses a lot, but not exclusively on Jones Day.

I think that's actually a good place to start because as you put it, this is what a lot of law firms use as the all purpose excuse to not only defend the work they're doing, but really deflect any questions or scrutiny about the work they're doing.

And it's true, of course, that everyone who is accused of wrongdoing under the American legal system and justice system is entitled to zealous legal representation.

No one disputes that at all. The question is whether everyone in all circumstances, so not just when someone's accused of a crime, but when someone is say trying to lobby against government regulations or trying to win elective office or trying to intimidate a witness or trying to intimidate local officials from implementing regulations.

Do you deserve representation? Are you entitled to representation for those types of services? And I think that is a much more complicated question. And I think the answer sometimes no, you do not or at least you deserve lots of scrutiny for providing that kind of legal services, but it's a debate that law firms are generally really I think reluctant to get into it.

So they kind of wave their hand at this and say, look, you're attacking the notion that everyone is entitled to legal representation. And I'm not and I don't think anyone is.

And I want to come back to that particular issue later. So let me talk though, you go through the beginning, you know, you start with Jones day, you know, firm and Cleveland, Ohio, right, that's its roots.

And you get into how law firms became what we know of them today, not only the big law firms like scad and Arps and Jones day, but also all of the plaintiffs attorneys, right, I was just driving back from California the other day.

And when you hit Las Vegas, basically central Las Vegas, the strip, there must be Dave in that two or three mile stretch of I 15, no fewer than 60 plaintiffs attorneys law firms.

And they all have, you know, it's either the big picture of the guy or, you know, really tough names. And for those of us who weren't sort of cognizant of this stuff before it occurred, it's interesting to see that there was a time before plaintiffs attorneys, you know, were you injured, were you at Camp Lejeune and also pharmaceutical ads, right, that you can't swing a dead cat and not hit at this point either.

I agree, I think it's really interesting to note that it was not always the case that highways were blanketed by ads for lawyers and, you know, TV commercials were not always a thing where you could see ads for drug companies.

And this all stems from a series of kind of long forgotten but really important Supreme Court decisions in the mid to late 1970s where drug companies and law firms among others argue that they basically had a first amendment right to advertise their service.

And at the time, especially in the legal community, lawyers were essentially prohibited from not just advertising their services but promoting themselves in any way.

And so local bar associations literally said you cannot take out advertisements in the local newspaper much less run an ad on TV or a long highway billboard.

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