Susman Godfrey expands race-based prize amid fight with White House
When a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s executive order targeting Susman Godfrey, long considered the top litigation boutique in the nation, the firm hailed the decision as a win for equality under the law.
“This fight is bigger and more important than any one firm,” Susman Godfrey wrote in a press release on April 15. “Susman Godfrey is fighting this unconstitutional executive order because it infringes on the rights of all Americans and the rule of law.”
One month later, the firm announced the recipients of a prestigious prize that only minorities are eligible to win.
The Susman Godfrey Prize, which includes a $4,000 cash award and “ongoing mentoring” from the firm’s attorneys, is typically given to 20 “students of color” at a handful of top law schools. In his executive order targeting the firm, President Donald Trump cited the prize as an example of “blatant discrimination” that should disqualify the firm from government contracts and security clearances.
Rather than make the prize open to all, Susman Godfrey doubled down, announcing on May 16 that it expanded the number of recipients from 20 to 25 but kept the racial criteria intact. The winners, who must be nominated by their respective institutions, included Harvard Law Review president G. Terrell Seabrooks, who is now fending off two federal probes over the journal’s race-based policies.
President Donald Trump has launched a wide-ranging campaign against Big Law, issuing executive orders that target particular firms and directing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency that enforces employment discrimination law, to investigate the race-based practices of the private bar. The decision to award the prize despite that onslaught underscores the unwillingness of some top firms to part ways with their diversity programs, even as those programs provide fodder for federal probes and private lawsuits.
Several firms agreed to end race-based hiring as part of deals struck with the White House and EEOC in April. But at least eight of those firms have continued receiving interns through an outside staffing agency, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, that places minority students at elite law firms. According to an EEOC complaint filed last week, the initiative is “the largest racially discriminatory hiring pipeline program in the legal field.”
The Susman Godfrey Prize may be less vulnerable than those other programs, legal experts told the Washington Free Beacon, because, in 2023, the firm changed the prize so that it no longer included a job offer, just cash and mentorship benefits. Designed to exempt the award from the laws against race-based contracting, the change came after a conservative nonprofit, American Alliance for Equal Rights, threatened to sue the firm.
“We wish you would have complied with the law by eliminating the racial discrimination (instead of the contract),” lawyers for the group told Susman Godfrey in a letter. “But your revised program—handing out money based on skin color—appears to be just demeaning virtue-signaling, not a violation of [the law].”
Susman Godfrey made a similar argument at a May 8 hearing challenging Trump’s executive order, telling the court that the prize is a “grant … not a contract.” A spokeswoman for the firm, Jessica Bughman, referred the Free Beacon to a transcript of that hearing when asked to comment on the prize’s legality.
But other attorneys said that firm may not be out of the legal woods yet. Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, argued that the promise of “ongoing mentoring” could be construed as a job training program under Title VII, the law that bans race discrimination in employment.
“It looks like Susman is an employer choosing whom to include in a training program it controls because of race,” Morenoff said. “That sounds like a straightforward violation of Title VII.”
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