Two of the most accomplished and recognizable Supreme Court litigators in the United States are leaving Paul Weiss Supreme for rival firm Davis Polk in a high-profile talent departure that represents another significant blow to a law firm that has been navigating one of the most turbulent and reputationally damaging periods in its long institutional history, following its controversial deal with the Trump administration in March 2025 and the subsequent resignation of its longtime chairman Brad Karp from his leadership position in February. Kannon Shanmugam and Masha Hansford, who together led Paul Weiss's Supreme Court practice and built one of the most respected appellate advocacy operations at any major American law firm, will launch a dedicated Supreme Court practice at Davis Polk, a firm that shares Paul Weiss's identity as a premier Wall Street transactions and corporate advisory powerhouse but that has not previously maintained the kind of specialist Supreme Court litigation capability that Shanmugam and Hansford bring with them from their years of building and leading that practice at their former firm. The departure of Shanmugam in particular, who led Paul Weiss's Supreme Court practice and whose client roster has included some of the most consequential and high-profile legal matters to reach the nation's highest court in recent years, is the kind of talent loss that cannot easily be replaced and that will be felt in the firm's ability to serve clients who need representation at the Supreme Court level for years to come.

Davis Polk, which employs more than 1,000 attorneys and has long been regarded as one of the preeminent corporate law firms in the United States with particular strength in mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, and financial regulatory matters, confirmed the moves but declined to provide additional comment beyond acknowledging that Shanmugam and Hansford would be joining the firm. Neither Shanmugam nor Hansford provided immediate public comment on the move, which is consistent with the professional norms around major law firm transitions that typically involve careful coordination of client relationship transfers, conflict resolution processes, and partner agreement terms before public statements are made. Paul Weiss, which employs more than 1,500 lawyers and has historically been one of the most prominent and prestigious law firms in the country, issued a statement thanking Shanmugam and Hansford for their contributions to the firm, a gracious but necessarily brief public acknowledgment of a departure that represents a genuine and consequential loss for an institution already dealing with significant internal and external challenges across multiple dimensions of its operations and reputation.

Shanmugam's credentials and client relationships make his departure the most immediately impactful of the two from a pure business development and client retention perspective, though Hansford's departure simultaneously removes the second pillar of the Supreme Court practice that Shanmugam had built and ensures that Paul Weiss cannot simply regroup around remaining talent and continue the practice in diminished form. Shanmugam's clients have included ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, AstraZeneca, and the National Football League, a portfolio of relationships that spans the energy, financial services, pharmaceutical, and sports industries and that collectively represents an enormous amount of high-stakes Supreme Court work with clients who have both the resources to fund the most expensive appellate advocacy available and the incentive to retain the best possible representation when their cases reach the nation's highest court. His background as a former law clerk to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most influential legal minds of his generation, gives him a pedigree and an understanding of the Court's intellectual culture and decision-making processes that is shared by only a small number of practicing attorneys and that contributes directly to his effectiveness as an advocate before the nine justices who will decide his clients' most important legal questions.

How Paul Weiss Built and Then Began Losing Its Supreme Court Capabilities

Paul Weiss's development of a dedicated Supreme Court practice under Shanmugam's leadership represented a deliberate strategic decision to build beyond the firm's traditional identity as a Wall Street deal-making and litigation powerhouse into the specialized and highly competitive world of appellate advocacy at the nation's highest court, a market segment where a small number of elite practitioners with specific credentials, relationships, and advocacy skills command enormous fees for work that carries outsized importance to the corporations and individuals who need it. The Supreme Court litigation market is characterized by an extraordinarily high concentration of talent among a small number of specialist practitioners, many of whom have the same combination of elite law school credentials, Supreme Court clerkship experience, and years of appellate practice that Shanmugam brings to the field, and the ability of a major law firm to compete effectively in this market depends almost entirely on the quality and reputation of the specific individuals it employs rather than on the institutional brand of the firm itself in the way that some other legal practice areas do. Paul Weiss's investment in building that capability through Shanmugam and Hansford was paying commercial dividends through the major client relationships and high-profile matters that the practice was attracting before the firm's broader institutional difficulties began creating the conditions that ultimately led to this departure.

The professional environment at Paul Weiss changed significantly following the firm's decision in March 2025 to reach an agreement with the Trump administration to avoid the consequences of an executive order that threatened the firm's business operations in ways that its leadership concluded were too damaging to resist through litigation alone. The deal, which included a commitment by the firm to donate $40 million worth of free legal services to support causes aligned with the Trump administration's priorities, drew intense criticism from across the legal profession and from within the firm's own ranks, with numerous partners, associates, and observers characterizing the arrangement as a capitulation to political pressure that compromised the firm's institutional independence and set a troubling precedent for how major law firms respond to government coercion. Eight other law firms struck similar agreements with the White House during the same period, while four other firms chose instead to seek and obtain court orders blocking the Trump administration's measures against them, creating a visible division within the elite law firm world between those who negotiated accommodations and those who litigated their way to protection.

Karp's departure from the chairman role in February, coming approximately a year after the Trump administration deal was struck and following the release of Justice Department emails that revealed his personal and professional communications with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, removed the long-serving leader who had both architected the administration deal and served as the public face of the firm through the controversy surrounding it. Paul Weiss has acknowledged that Karp regrets his interactions with Epstein, and Karp himself has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with those communications, but the revelation of the emails and their public disclosure through a Justice Department release created a further and deeply personal dimension of institutional difficulty for a firm that was already managing the reputational consequences of the Trump deal and the internal tensions that agreement had produced within its partnership. The combination of these events, unfolding across more than a year, created an institutional environment in which the retention of top talent became significantly more challenging than it had been during the long period of the firm's consistent growth and prestige, and the Shanmugam and Hansford departure is in important respects a consequence of that cumulative institutional difficulty rather than a coincidental event that happens to follow the other challenges the firm has faced.

What Davis Polk Gains and How the Move Changes the Competitive Landscape of Supreme Court Litigation

Davis Polk's acquisition of Shanmugam and Hansford to launch a dedicated Supreme Court practice represents one of the most significant strategic additions to the firm's service capabilities in recent years, filling what had been a notable gap in a firm that is exceptionally strong in corporate transactions, capital markets, financial regulatory work, and mergers and acquisitions advisory but had not previously maintained the kind of specialist appellate advocacy at the Supreme Court level that its most sophisticated corporate clients increasingly need as the volume and significance of Supreme Court business litigation continues to grow. The Supreme Court's docket in recent years has included an increasing number of cases with direct and major commercial implications for the kinds of large corporations, financial institutions, and industry groups that represent Davis Polk's core client base, touching on issues from securities litigation and antitrust enforcement to environmental regulation, arbitration law, and constitutional questions about the scope of regulatory agency authority that affect virtually every sector of the American economy. Having Shanmugam and Hansford available to serve those clients when their legal matters reach the Supreme Court, or when they need the kind of strategic guidance about whether and how to seek Supreme Court review that the best appellate practitioners provide, is a capability that Davis Polk's leadership has clearly determined is worth the cost and competitive disruption involved in recruiting from a rival firm.

The competitive dynamic between Paul Weiss and Davis Polk has historically been conducted primarily in the corporate transactions and financial regulatory spaces where both firms compete for some of the same major institutional clients and where the quality and reputation of individual partners are the primary determinants of client loyalty and business allocation. The addition of a Supreme Court practice to Davis Polk's capabilities creates a new dimension of potential client overlap and competition between the two firms, as Paul Weiss's existing relationships with the major corporations and financial institutions that have historically retained Shanmugam for their Supreme Court matters may now face a choice about whether to follow him to his new institutional home or to remain with Paul Weiss and seek alternative Supreme Court representation from other practitioners in the market. Client following behavior in major law firm transitions is always uncertain and depends on the specific nature and history of the individual client relationships involved, but the strength and longevity of Shanmugam's relationships with clients including ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, and others suggest that a meaningful portion of those relationships may migrate with him to Davis Polk over time as matters arise and new engagements are sought.

The broader competitive landscape of Supreme Court litigation practice among major law firms is one that has been evolving for several years as more large firms have recognized the strategic and commercial value of maintaining dedicated appellate advocacy capabilities rather than relying on ad hoc arrangements or case-by-case relationships with specialist Supreme Court boutiques. The concentration of Supreme Court litigation talent at a small number of major firms, combined with the intense competition for the limited pool of practitioners with the credentials and experience to practice effectively at that level, means that departures of the magnitude represented by Shanmugam and Hansford leaving Paul Weiss simultaneously are rare and consequential events that reshape competitive positioning in ways that take years to fully play out across client relationships, matter assignments, and the reputational standing of the firms involved. Davis Polk's willingness to invest in launching an entirely new practice area by recruiting two established practitioners from a competitor reflects a confidence in its ability to support and grow that capability across its existing client base and to attract new clients who previously had no reason to consider Davis Polk for Supreme Court work but now have a compelling reason to do so.

What the Departure Means for Paul Weiss Going Forward and How the Firm Responds

Paul Weiss faces the challenge of responding to the Shanmugam and Hansford departure in the context of an institution that is simultaneously managing the ongoing reputational and cultural consequences of the Trump administration deal, the leadership transition following Karp's departure from the chairman role, and the general uncertainty about direction and identity that major law firms experience when they face concentrated periods of external pressure and internal disruption of the kind that Paul Weiss has endured over the past year and more. The firm's response to the talent departure will be closely watched by the legal community as an indicator of its institutional resilience and its ability to retain and attract top talent despite the challenges it has faced, with competitors, clients, current partners, and prospective lateral hires all drawing their own conclusions about what the departure signifies about the firm's trajectory and its ability to compete for the best available legal talent across practice areas.

The loss of the Supreme Court practice in its established form does not mean Paul Weiss is without options for rebuilding appellate capabilities, but the rebuilding process would require either the development of internal talent that takes years to reach the level of recognition and effectiveness that Shanmugam had achieved, or the recruitment of established Supreme Court practitioners from other firms or from government service in a competitive market where the available talent is limited and where the institutional circumstances at Paul Weiss may make recruitment more difficult than it would be under normal conditions. The firm's existing strengths in litigation, corporate transactions, and its other core practice areas remain substantial and provide a foundation from which recovery and stabilization are certainly possible, but the specific and visible gap left by the departure of two practitioners who had built something distinctive and commercially valuable at the Supreme Court level is not one that can be quickly or easily filled through ordinary talent management processes.

The clients who had relationships with Paul Weiss specifically through Shanmugam and Hansford's Supreme Court practice now face decisions about their representation that they likely did not anticipate making in the near term, and how they resolve those decisions will be one of the most consequential practical tests of whether the talent departure translates into permanent client losses for Paul Weiss or whether the firm's overall institutional relationships and service quality are strong enough to retain client loyalty despite the specific capability gap that the departures create. For the broader legal market, the episode illustrates once again the fragility of institutional reputation under sustained pressure and the speed with which accumulated reputational capital can be eroded when a firm faces the combination of political controversy, leadership disruption, and high-profile talent departures that Paul Weiss has experienced across a relatively compressed period that has tested the institution's resilience in ways that its leadership is still working to address and recover from.