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    How a Trump-Beating, #MeToo Legal Legend Lost Her Firm

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    Roberta Kaplan’s work as a lawyer made her a hero to the left. But behind the scenes, she was known for her poor treatment of colleagues.Last fall, senior partners at Kaplan Hecker & Fink, a New York law firm known for championing liberal causes, made a fateful decision: They were going to sideline their hard-charging and crusading founder, Roberta A. Kaplan.The reign of one of the country’s most prominent lawyers was coming to an end.Ms. Kaplan was already famous when she founded her law firm in 2017, having won a landmark Supreme Court case that paved the way for marriage equality for gay Americans. The firm soon gained national prominence because of her leadership in the #MeToo movement, and more recently for high-profile victories against white supremacists and former President Donald J. Trump.But those triumphs couldn’t overcome an uncomfortable reality, according to people familiar with the law firm’s internal dynamics.In the eyes of many of her colleagues, including the firm’s two other named partners, Ms. Kaplan’s poor treatment of other lawyers — ranging from micromanagement to vulgar insults and humiliating personal attacks — was impairing the boutique firm she had built, the people said. For one thing, they said, she was jeopardizing its ability to recruit and retain valuable employees.Ms. Kaplan and other partners had also clashed over issues of management and strategy, and some of her colleagues were frustrated by the difficulties of achieving consensus with her, several people said.Ms. Kaplan was told last fall that it had become untenable for her to remain on the firm’s management committee — a sharp rebuke for a founding partner. She agreed to step down from the committee. The decision began a monthslong chain of events that culminated this week with Ms. Kaplan’s announcement that she was leaving Kaplan Hecker to start a new firm.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Prominent Lawyer Roberta Kaplan Departs Firm After Clash With Colleagues

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      The well-connected attorney, who founded a powerhouse firm at the dawn of the #MeToo era, has faced complaints that she mistreated and insulted other lawyers.Roberta A. Kaplan, the celebrated lawyer who took on former President Donald J. Trump, and helped win marriage equality for gay Americans, is stepping down from the law firm she founded after clashing with her partners over her treatment of colleagues.Ms. Kaplan, a hard-charging civil rights lawyer, announced that she was leaving the firm, Kaplan Hecker & Fink, which she formed in 2017, to start a new one.Her departure followed months of internal frustration over Ms. Kaplan’s conduct toward other lawyers, according to people familiar with the matter. Those concerns led her colleagues to remove her from the firm’s management committee and precipitated her departure.Ms. Kaplan’s former firm will be renamed Hecker Fink effective Monday. “Robbie brought us together and for that we owe her a debt of gratitude,” the firm’s remaining partners said in an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times.“It was Robbie’s decision to leave the firm,” the firm’s two named partners, Julie Fink and Sean Hecker, said in a statement. “We wish her the very best and look forward to working with her and her new firm in the future.”Ms. Kaplan said in an interview with Bloomberg that she was leaving with a colleague because Kaplan Hecker & Fink had grown “in size and complexity beyond what I had in mind and I wanted to get back to something nimbler.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      E Jean. Carroll’s Lawyers Ask That Trump Not Make Defamation Trial a ‘Circus’

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      The writer next week will seek a second round of damages from the former president for his denials that he sexually assaulted her.A lawyer for the writer E. Jean Carroll, whose latest defamation lawsuit against Donald J. Trump is scheduled for trial next week in Manhattan, asked a judge Friday to ensure that if the former president testifies, that he does not stray beyond the narrow issue in the case, with the goal of “turning this trial into a circus.”“If Mr. Trump appears at this trial, whether as a witness or otherwise,” the lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, wrote in a letter, “his recent statements and behavior strongly suggest that he will seek to sow chaos.”In the letter, which comes just four days before jury selection is to begin in Federal District Court, Ms. Kaplan cited Mr. Trump’s continued derogatory public comments about Ms. Carroll and his behavior in another case involving him this week.On Thursday, Mr. Trump attended the final day of trial in the New York attorney general’s civil fraud case against him, where — after the judge allowed him to argue on his own behalf — he attacked the attorney general, Letitia James, called himself the victim of fraud and assailed the judge to his face. Afterward, Mr. Trump told reporters that he also planned to attend Ms. Carroll’s trial.“I’m going to explain I don’t know who the hell she is,” he said. “I have no idea.”But the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, has already ruled that a jury’s verdict last May in an earlier civil trial, which found that Mr. Trump was liable for sexually assaulting Ms. Carroll in a department store dressing room in the 1990s and had later defamed her, will carry over to the trial next week. The judge thus has limited the trial to one issue — what damages, if any, Mr. Trump must pay Ms. Carroll for defaming her on a separate occasion in 2019 when he called her allegation “totally false.”The request by Ms. Carroll’s lawyer to constrain Mr. Trump, 77, comes as he has lashed out at her while moving among courthouses and political stops in his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. On a single day recently, he issued more than 40 derisive posts about her on his Truth Social website, and last weekend, while campaigning in Iowa, he accused her of fabricating her claim and called the judge in the case a “radical Democrat in New York.”Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, declined to comment on Ms. Kaplan’s letter, citing trial publicity rules. The judge said Friday that Mr. Trump had until Sunday to file a response, and Ms. Habba said she would be doing so.In her letter, Ms. Kaplan (who is not related to the judge) asked that he admonish Mr. Trump about the limited damages issue before the jury. She also asked that he require Mr. Trump to state on the record and under oath, out of the jury’s presence, that he understands that certain facts have been established.“The court’s recent rulings leave no doubt about what is permissible and what is off-limits,” Ms. Kaplan wrote. “Mr. Trump cannot testify that he did not sexually assault Ms. Carroll. He cannot claim that he did not rape her, or did not know her, or had never seen her before. He cannot question or attack her motives for revealing that he had assaulted her. He cannot say that he was defending himself from a false accusation.”The letter asked that Mr. Trump acknowledge he understands and accepts “all of the limits that the court has imposed on his testimony” and will act in accordance.Mr. Trump has been attacking Ms. Carroll, 80, since 2019, when she first accused him of raping her in a book excerpt that appeared in New York magazine. She has sued him twice, and in the first case to go to trial last May, the jury awarded Ms. Carroll damages of just over $2 million for sexually abusing her and nearly $3 million for defaming her, in 2022, when he called her claim “a complete con job” and a hoax.Because the judge found that Mr. Trump’s statements in 2019 were “substantially the same” as those that prompted the defamation award last May, there was no need to revisit the underlying facts of the assault.Ms. Kaplan in her letter included a transcript of Mr. Trump’s remarks on Thursday to the judge who is deciding the civil fraud trial, in which the former president called the state’s case “a political witch hunt” and declared he was innocent.“It takes little imagination to think that Mr. Trump is gearing up for a similar performance here — only this time, in front of a jury,” Ms. Kaplan wrote.Susan C. Beachy More