BCG Attorney Search Law Firm News

11/07/14

Top Campaign Donors for Law Firms: DLA Piper and Akin Gump

Summary: The mid-term election is behind us and now the campaign donation statistics are coming out. DLA Piper and Akin Gump topped the list of law firm donors this year.

DLA Piper and Akin Gump

When it comes to law firm political contributions, the Democrats came away victorious, despite the win for Republicans on Tuesday, according to Bloomberg.

The Center for Responsive Politics found that out of the14 large corporate firms in the top 20, six of them donated funds to Democratic candidates more heavily than to Republican candidates.

Those six firms are Akin Gump Strauss Hauer& Feld LLP;DLA Piper LLP; Squire Patton Boggs Write a review for this law firm LLP; Covington & Burling LLP; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP; and Sullivan & Cromwell LLP.

There were five firms in the top 20 that donated funds almost equally to both parties. Those five firms are Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP; Holland & Knight LLP; K&L Gates LLP Write a review for this law firm; Greenberg Traurig LLP; Alston & Bird; and Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP.

There were just two firms from the top 20 that donated more money to Republicans than to Democrats and they were Boies Schiller & Flexner LLP and Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

The firm at the top of the list is Akin Gump, which donated $1.67 million. All of the firms in the top 20 donated more than $500,000 to campaigns across the country.

"Many of our partners are politically involved," Ben Harris, an Akin Gump spokesman, said. "While we cannot speak to individual partner's motivations for donating to a particular candidate, we can certainly confirm that Akin Gump partners have in the past supported, and continue to support, candidates across a broad political and ideological spectrum."

The donations are from the 2013-2014 federal election cycle and were provided by the Federal Election Commission at the end of October. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the money came from PACs, soft-money donors and individuals who gave $200 or more to a campaign.

"The overall numbers show both PAC contributions and contributions by our individual lawyers," William Minor, a partner from the law firm of DLA Piper, said in an interview with Bloomberg. "Our lawyers are active in their communities and make contributions based on their own preferences. But for the firm, our PAC strives for bipartisanship, reflecting the work that we and our clients do with elected officials on both sides of the aisle."

https://www.bcgsearch.com/bcgnews/900043315/Top-Campaign-Donors-for-Law-Firms-DLA-Piper-and-Akin-Gump/

>>10914265 Is Mass Mail-in Voting About to Backfire on Democrats?

Important part of article by Katie Plavlich

It’s been six months since mass mail-in voting was first proposed. There is one month to go until the 2020 presidential election. This experiment has already been nothing short of a completely predictable disaster.

In New York, several delayed results from a Democratic primary served as a huge red flag.

“Election officials in New York City widely distributed mail-in ballots for the primary on June 23, which featured dozens of hard-fought races. The officials had hoped to make voting much easier, but they did not seem prepared for the response: more than 10 times the number of absentee ballots received in recent elections in the city,” the New York Times reported in August. “Now, nearly six weeks later, two closely watched congressional races remain undecided, and major delays in counting a deluge of 400,000 mail-in ballots and other problems are being cited as examples of the challenges facing the nation as it looks toward conducting the November general election during the pandemic."

In states across the country, households are receiving numerous ballots, with none of them addressed to the person who currently lives at the residence.

“A Washington, DC, friend had EIGHT ballots sent to her apartment. ZERO ballots were for the current resident,” Nathan Brand, who works at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, recently tweeted.

The results have been so chaotic and unreliable, The New York Times Editorial Board is now calling for voters to cast their ballots in person.

“Any New Yorker who is able to do so ought to vote early and in person. The news this week that the city’s Board of Elections sent defective absentee ballots to nearly 100,000 voters makes this need clear,” they argue.

All along, this is what Republicans and President Trump have been encouraging Americans to do – in local and national elections.

But considering Democrats are still voting by mail in droves, their votes are the most at risk. In the New York races, which adopted mass mail-in voting this year, 20 percent of ballots received were thrown out or disqualified due to human error. In states across the country, hundreds-of-thousands of votes via mail were rejected.

“More than 534,000 mail ballots were rejected during primaries across 23 states this year — nearly a quarter in key battlegrounds for the fall — illustrating how missed delivery deadlines, inadvertent mistakes and uneven enforcement of the rules could disenfranchise voters and affect the outcome of the presidential election,” the Washington Post reports. “The rates of rejection, which in some states exceeded those of other recent elections, could make a difference in the fall if the White House contest is decided by a close margin, as it was in 2016, when Donald Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by roughly 80,000 votes…This year, according to a tally by The Washington Post, election officials in those three states tossed out more than 60,480 ballots just during primaries.”

On the campaign trail, Democrats continue to tout a surge in mail-in voting requests while Republicans plan on voting in person. Ironically, Democrats have put their own votes in jeopardy in yet another failed attempt to prove President Trump wrong. It turns out he was right all along.