Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison

Paul, Weiss's core practice areas are in litigation and corporate law.[3] In addition to its headquarters in New York, the firm has offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Wilmington, Delaware, Toronto, London, Tokyo, Beijing, and Hong Kong.

• Paul, Weiss assisted Thurgood Marshall to reverse the doctrine of "separate but equal" in Brown v. Board of Education.[23]
• Paul, Weiss represents detainees held by the U.S. military at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. A number of the detainees went on a hunger strike to protest alleged inhumane conditions. In response, prison authorities force-fed detainees. Paul, Weiss attorneys filed an emergency application demanding information about the condition of the detainees. In a ruling in October 2005, Judge Gladys Kessler of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the government to provide the detainees' lawyers with 24 hours' notice before initiating a force-feeding, and to provide lawyers with the detainees’ medical records a week before force-feeding.[24]
• Paul, Weiss advised the casino operating unit of Caesars Entertainment in its bankruptcy proceedings, taking over the role from O'Melveny & Myers in 2011. It later became known that Apollo Global Management, a private equity sponsor of Caesars, was also a Paul, Weiss client. Paul, Weiss was found to have a conflict of interest in the matter, although an investigation found no actual harm to Caesars or its creditors.[25]
• Paul, Weiss represented the China Medical Technologies (CMED) Audit Committee in investigating an anonymous letter alleging possible illegal and fraudulent activities by management, prior to CMED being discovered to have been the subject of a $355 million fraud.[26][27][28][29][30][31][32]
• Paul, Weiss represented Edith Windsor in challenging the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor in 2013.[23]
• Paul, Weiss issued the report in the Deflategate football inflation controversy in 2015.[33]
• In 2010, Paul, Weiss represented General Atlantic in its acquisition of First Republic Bank, in a $1.86 billion deal.[34]
• In 2016, Fox News hired the firm to conduct an internal investigation about Roger Ailes,[35] leading to the end of Ailes' career.[36]

In 2018, Paul, Weiss worked pro bono to try and find over 400 parents who were separated from their families at the southern border of the United States and then deported.[37] The work was part of the federal American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit, which was brought against the Trump administration over its family separation policy.[38] ACLU asked Paul, Weiss to head the committee that worked with three nonprofits to find the parents.[38] By November, almost all of the 400 deported parents had been found.[38]

In 2019, Pablo Fernandez was released from jail after being wrongfully convicted of murder.[39] He had served over twenty-four years in prison.[39] Lawyers from Paul, Weiss were his pro-bono defense team.[39]

On October 10, 2007, Paul, Weiss was included in a ranking of Manhattan law firms by the national law student group Building a Better Legal Profession.[40][41] The organization ranked firms by billable hours, demographic diversity, and pro bono participation. For diversity among partner attorneys, the firm was ranked in the 61st to 80th percentile for Black, Hispanic, Asian, and LGBT categories. Paul, Weiss was also ranked number 52 out of the 74 firms evaluated, for opportunities for advancement for female attorneys.[42][40] In 2019, the nonprofit group Lawyers of Color reported that Paul, Weiss had the highest percentage of black lawyers of the 400 firms it ranked.[43] In 2020, women comprised 26% of Paul, Weiss’ partnership, all equity partners.[44] This is slightly higher than the average for law firms (23.6% as reported by the National Association for Law Placement).[44]

William Thaddeus Coleman Jr. was the first black lawyer hired at the firm. When he was hired in 1949, it was the first time ever that a major New York City law firm hired a person of color as an associate.[45][46] Pauli Murray, a civil rights and gender equality activist, was an associate at Paul, Weiss from 1956 to 1960.[47] Jeh Johnson, a lawyer and the fourth director and secretary of Homeland Security, was hired by Paul, Weiss in 1994 as the firm's first African-American partner.[48] After he stepped down from Homeland Security in 2017 he rejoined the firm's litigation department.[48] Loretta Lynch, the first black woman to serve as United States attorney general, joined Paul, Weiss in 2019 as a litigation partner.[43]

In 2020, Paul, Weiss said it wanted to unite law firms and public-interest organizations across the U.S. in a pro-bono effort to root out racism.[49] Attorney Jeh Johnson of Paul, Weiss was assigned to serve as New York State Chief Judge Janet DiFiore's Special Advisor on Equal Justice in the Courts.[50]

In 2022, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison was a founding member of the Legal Alliance for Reproductive Rights, a coalition of United States law firms offering free legal services to people seeking and providing abortions in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overruled Roe v. Wade.[51]

• Randolph E. Paul
• Louis S. Weiss
• Simon H. Rifkind
• John F. Wharton
• Lloyd K. Garrison
• Arthur Joseph Goldberg

• List of largest law firms by profits per partner