As media attention piled onto his law firm like a late spring Sierra snow dump, Elliot Peters received a text from a former client, cyclist Lance Armstrong.
“You boys are fucking legends,” it read.
“Which is just kind of Lance — like Texan Lance, right?” Peters said in an interview with Gazetteer SF. “But he’s also our friend, you know. I mean, I like Lance a lot.”
The five word text, its sender, and reaction, says a lot about Keker, Van Nest & Peters, or KVP, the 138-attorney law firm in Jackson Square that has in fact, somewhat improbably (because we are, after all, talking about corporate lawyers), earned its place as a San Francisco legend.
It won its reputation by representing high-profile defendants like Armstrong, who admitted to using performance enhancing drugs, and investment banker Frank Quattrone. The firm’s partners pitch themselves as litigation black belts, ready to do hand-to-hand combat at trial, if necessary, in high-stakes white collar criminal, commercial, and intellectual property cases across the U.S.
Armstrong’s text was inspired by KVP’s outspoken support for a different law firm, Seattle-based Perkins Coie. The latter being the first target in President Donald Trump’s executive orders designed to, effectively, bend and break lawyers to conform to his demands. Citing Perkins Coie’s “dishonest and dangerous” activities, the order aims to investigate its hiring practices, suspend any security clearances, block it from government contracting, and prohibit its access to federal buildings (which would include courthouses).
If the U.S. is at risk of sinking into an autocracy, the orders against law firms represent a critical threshold. In them, Trump is attempting to smash constraints on executive privilege by marshaling Justice Department resources and attorneys to mete out personal, and often long-standing, grudges against lawyers who worked for people or causes that, in his view, attempted to derail his ascent. Perkins Coie’s offense was that it represented Hillary Clinton almost a decade ago.
Unlike many firms that cut deals to appease Trump, Perkins Coie sued the U.S. in March, arguing the president’s order is unconstitutional. Peters took special note of a March 21 White House memo attempting to justify its executive orders, which singled out a Perkins Coie lawyer.
The next morning, a Saturday, after a Reuters reporter called his firm seeking comment for a related story, Peters sat at his kitchen table and wrote a five sentence response, which was reviewed by some of his partners and published on his firm’s website. It said Trump’s directive “underscores how far removed this President, Attorney General and Administration are from our nation’s Constitution and bedrock values,” and concluded by urging law firms to join an amicus, or “friend of the court,” brief supporting Perkins Coie in its lawsuit.
What happened next was unprecedented in the legal industry.
Media attention to Peters’response was followed by a New York Times-requested guest essay, authored by senior partners John Keker, Bob Van Nest, and Peters. It then grew to television, with Van Nest appearing on CBS News, and Peters on CNN with Anderson Cooper. The local press in San Francisco has been prolific and fawning. The wave crested last week with Keker’s 60 Minutes interview, which has not yet aired.
The attention was all the more remarkable because though it offered to, KVP isn’t representing Perkins Coie, nor did it write the amicus brief it promoted. Traci Stuart, president of Blattel Communications, said she has never seen anything like the media frenzy in her 30 years in the legal marketing business. She was privy to a lot of lawyerly hand-wringing over Trump’s executive orders, she said, but Peters’ statement tapped into a longing to see attorneys step up for the profession – and themselves.
“This was the public wanting to hear what lawyers were going to say about the situation,” Stuart said.
KVP was rewarded for its “first-mover advantage,” she added. The firm “did a really good job of distilling the overall sentiment into a really quick statement and perspective that needed to be spoken.”
But Stuart and lawyer sources point to another factor that made it easier for KVP to speak out, which hasn’t been noted in the windfall of praise for the firm: It is a “litigation boutique.” Meaning it focuses on the civil and criminal fights, in briefs and in court, that people generally associate with hard-nosed lawyering. It has none of the so-called “transactional” lawyers that specialize in mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, or venture capital financing.
The bigger firms that cut deals with Trump have lucrative groups of transactional lawyers that are known to defect to, or get picked off by, competitors. Many big California firms, especially those that feed off of Silicon Valley, depend heavily on such groups. Their concern is that Trump’s executive orders, or threats, make them vulnerable to punitive crackdowns and an exodus of their transactional lawyers, perhaps to the point of jeopardizing the firms’ futures.
KVP faces no such risk by speaking out against Trump. To the contrary, publicizing its objection could attract clients for the litigation-only firm, lawyers said. In this view, what’s been portrayed as a courageous, principled position, is more transparently just good PR. Indeed, Peters said, standing up to Trump has attracted clients, but he also insists that he had no expectation of the media attention. He believes the threat to bigger firms’ transactional practices is a false premise, and that those who compromise with the president will pay a steep price.
“It’s just the shit that they were afraid of was so plainly unconstitutional that they could have gone to court and enjoined it,” Peters said, referring to Trump’s executive orders. Perkins Coie immediately won a federal court ruling temporarily blocking Trump’s order. Two other judges handling similar orders against firms WilmerHale and Jenner & Block did the same.
New York-based Paul, Weiss, another Trump target, was the first to give in, agreeing to do $40 million in pro-bono work for causes that the White House has identified as worthy, such as “combatting anti-Semitism,” which Peters sees as a thinly veiled cover to stamp out protected free-speech rights for Palestinian advocacy.
Paul, Weiss has roots as “these New York Jews who were tough, smart, the best litigators,” said Peters (who is Jewish and from New York). “That’s not who they are anymore,” he said, adding that Paul, Weiss wasn’t really at risk from Trump’s order.
“What, they’re talking about some guy that maybe makes $15 million, in the next year makes $12 million? Well, I'm sorry, dude, in that case, the rule of law is more important than a couple of million dollars to a guy with a home in the Hamptons and house on Park Avenue,” Peters said. “It’s just, to me, I would gladly make less money and live in a free society than roll over to a wannabe autocrat.”
Paul, Weiss didn’t respond to Gazetteer’s request for comment.
Trump’s orders against law firms may be profoundly legally flawed, but in some sense he has already won. According to Peters, Paul, Weiss’s flop likely only motivated the president, and set a precedent for the more than a half- dozen other law firms that, combined, have surrendered and offered up more than $500 million in pro-bono work.
“Those firms did a lot of harm to our system of government, to the rule of law, to the status of lawyers,” Peters said.
Peters, 67, is a former federal prosecutor in New York who worked under then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani. He joined the firm that became Keker and Van Nest in 1991, working for years under their long shadows. Keker, the firm’s founder, is routinely celebrated for his service as a Marine in the Vietnam War, prosecution of Oliver North over the Iran-Contra affair, and courtroom swagger. Van Nest remains a nimble intellectual property litigator who has represented technology giants such as Google, and fought others like Apple. He is currently defending OpenAI in copyright lawsuits brought by the New York Times and more than a dozen authors.
After about 25 years at the firm, Peters made a push. “I said to John one day, ‘I walk in in the morning and see Keker and Van Nest on the door, and I wonder if I’m just going to work my whole career to contribute to the glory of your and Bob’s law firm.’” Keker made him an offer: Peters could be a name partner if he agreed to spend the rest of his career there. They agreed, and in 2016 the firm was renamed.
“You have a different status within the firm as one of the name partners,” Peters said. “I think people in the legal community saw me differently when my name went on the door. I think people within the firm saw me differently, and I certainly feel a different kind of responsibility to the firm.”
Keker, at 81, no longer tries cases and is working a reduced schedule. Van Nest, 74, is seven years older than Peters. Becoming a name partner meant that as the firm undertakes what Peters describes as a “passing of the torch,” he will assume a more influential and visible leadership role.
In our interview, Peters was candid about the firm’s support for the Democratic party and liberal causes. It has hosted events for Vice President Kamala Harris, Senator Adam Schiff, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Rep. Nancy Pelosi frequently asks to use the firm’s conference room, Peters said. Jeffrey Toobin visited recently to discuss his new book.
He revealed unusually close relationships with clients, arguing their innocence decades after their cases were resolved. He was especially animated discussing Quattrone’s 2003 prosecution for obstruction of justice. “It was complete bullshit, that case, complete and utter bullshit,” he said. (The case against Quattrone was eventually dropped.)
Peters represented Armstrong in at least two cases, including one resulting in the cyclist paying $5 million to resolve federal civil claims. “Lance, you know, did what he did,” Peters said, referring to the doping that led to him being stripped of his seven Tour de France medals. “But in the world of cycling, everybody Lance rode against was doing that shit,” he added.
“I have a connection to the humanity of both Lance Armstrong and Frank Quattrone,” Peters said. Quattrone “is one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met in my life, he’s a wonderful guy, and Lance is kind of mercurial. He's like Peter Pan or something. I mean, Lance is incredibly charming. I’m very fond of both those guys.”
Peters proudly explained that KVP compensates its associates commensurate with the highest paid New York firms such as Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He refused to disclose salary figures but a leaked memo three years ago showed new hires earning $215,000, and more experienced associates earning $415,000. Those rates don’t include bonuses, and have certainly gone up since then.
In the near term, at least, KVP’s position against Trump is also helping recruit and keep younger attorneys, Peters said, giving them “bragging rights” over firms that have capitulated or remained silent. He suspects young lawyers aren’t interested in doing pro-bono work approved by Trump.
New hires at his firm, he said, “can say I work at a place that stands up for what we all believe in – and you work at a place where they give you a paycheck and you’re kind of half ashamed of what they've done.”
