American law students protest against law firm representing ExxonMobil, 2020

On 15 January 15th 2020, the corporate law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP (hereafter referred to as ‘Paul Weiss’) held a first-year student recruitment event at Harvard Law School. A group of around thirty law students from the school attended the event in order to interrupt it. Once the speaker from the firm began addressing the crowd, the students revealed a poster with the hashtag “#DropExxon.” The students also chanted over the voice of the speaker that they would not work for the firm until it dropped its Big Oil client, ExxonMobil; the students made this demand due to ExxonMobil’s record of environmental pollution. The protesting students livestreamed the disruption of the recruitment event on Facebook. Law students from Yale and Boston University expressed their support for the action.

On 6 February, Yale Law students carried out a direct action similar to the one at Harvard; around 40 students gathered at a restaurant where Paul Weiss was hosting a recruitment event. The students held up a banner reading “#DropExxon,” and disrupted the event with chants and speeches calling for students to boycott Paul Weiss until the firm dropped ExxonMobil as a client.

In the weeks that followed, a group of law students who protested at Harvard and Yale became the leading force of this campaign. The organizers decided to launch a national campaign by asking that law students at other schools not work for Paul Weiss while the firm retained ExxonMobil as a client. The newly formed group reached out to students at other schools to request they disrupt Paul Weiss events on their campuses as well. After the initial direct action at Harvard, law students at other law school campuses began protesting at Paul Weiss events held on their campuses.

The organizers of the events also sent out online links to a pledge to their fellow law students, asking that they sign an electronic form which stated “I, the undersigned law student, pledge that I will not interview with or work for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP until the firm has dropped ExxonMobil as its legal client.”

After the disruptions began, Paul Weiss responded with a brief statement to the press defending its choice to represent ExxonMobil: "We are proud of the outstanding work we do for a wide range of commercial and pro bono clients in their most challenging and high-profile matters, including our recent defense of ExxonMobil in a securities fraud case in which the court found, after trial, that plaintiff’s claims were entirely without merit."

On 11 February, thirty students at NYU Law School disrupted a recruitment event, unfurling a “#DropExxon” banner and chanting "First you heard from Harvard, then you heard from Yale; now you'll hear from us." A week later, 45 students at Michigan Law school attended at a Paul Weiss recruiting event at a restaurant and displayed this same banner. The students chanted that they would not work for Paul Weiss, and then all left the restaurant after seven minutes leaving only ten students at the event. Later that month, students at Stanford Law School hung posters around campus and set up tables to ask fellow students to sign the national pledge. 

After the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and in-person receptions were phased out, the organizers sent students to attend Paul Weiss’s Zoom receptions. The students on the Zoom calls challenged the firm’s representatives with questions about Paul Weiss’s involvement with major pollutants such as ExxonMobil.

The last recorded action of the campaign was on 9 October 2020 when organizers delivered the petition (the national pledge) to Paul Weiss headquarters, which, according to the organizers, had been “signed by OVER 600 LAW STUDENTS from over 45 law schools.” The same month, the Yale and Harvard students who composed the leadership of the DropExxon campaign launched Law Students for Climate Accountability (LSCA). In October, LSCA released the Law Firm Climate Change Scorecard which ranked firms “according to how much fossil fuels work they have engaged in over a five-year period.” The goal of the scorecard was to bring to light “the role the legal industry plays in the climate crisis.”

Ultimately, the campaign did not succeed in its goal of getting Paul Weiss to drop ExxonMobil as a client, but it did create broad student support on multiple university campuses and raised awareness about the problem.