Late Friday afternoon I dropped in on John Keker in his airy Jackson Square office, expecting to hear the distinguished lawyer discuss his firm’s public support for bigger legal outfits that are standing up to Donald Trump. What I discovered was a refreshingly new avatar for the resistance: an 81-year-old, fiction-reading, Napoleonic memorabilia-collecting, establishment San Franciscan and Marine combat veteran who is royally pissed off at a dangerously autocratic-leaning president’s assault on the legal profession.
Keker, Van Nest & Peters, the litigation-only firm he cofounded in 1978, had come out days earlier in support of Perkins Coie, one of the first firms the president targeted in a retaliatory executive order, which had successfully challenged Trump’s government. Two other prominent firms — Paul, Weiss and Skadden — had caved to Trump’s extortionary tactics, trading a combined $140 million in legal services for him to nix restrictions on their lawyers’ ability to work with the federal government.
I asked Keker why he was sticking his neck out.
“Because we’re disgusted by what the president is doing, and we’re fearful that this attack on the rule of law and on lawyers is a step down the road to autocracy and dictatorship,” he said, in the matter-of-fact baritone he used to prosecute national security aide Oliver North and defend investment banker Frank Quattrone. “I’m truly disgusted. And I’m disgusted that other lawyers don’t see it the same way and aren’t willing to act together.”
It’s not as if the firms that settled with Trump didn’t have a template for fighting. Perkins Coie secured an injunction, after all. “The chief judge of the District of Columbia said the whole attack on Perkins Coie sent a chill up her spine, which I think is a good way to put it,” said Keker. “And so instead of doing that, instead of running the risk that they’d lose some clients, running the risk that the case would go on for a while, [Paul, Weiss and Skadden] decided to buy their way out of it,” he said.
At 140 lawyers, Keker’s firm is possibly too small to incur Trump’s wrath — or would have been, had it not gone out of its way to poke the bear. (Keker and his two partners published an essay Sunday in The New York Times amplifying their point.)
A LinkedIn post backing Perkins Coie has drawn thousands of likes. One commenter posted a link to the UN’s Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, which states, among other things, that “governments shall ensure that lawyers are able to perform all of their professional functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference.” Keker said his firm hasn’t lost any business. But he acknowledged that it could. Prominent clients have included the cream of the corporate and entertainment worlds, including Alphabet, whose CEO, Sundar Pichai, attended Trump’s inauguration, and Major League Baseball.
Isn’t Keker worried about retaliation?
“Of course I’m concerned,” he said. “I don’t want to be a target. But if we are, there’s something more important than our personal situation. And if he comes after us, we will fight like a dog and try to bring him down.”
Keker doesn’t mince words about Trump, and after a long week contemplating an upside-down world — a Defense secretary claiming war plans aren’t classified, legal U.S. residents being snatched off the sidewalk for voicing their opinions — I found his words cathartic.
He said Trump has “learned his lesson” after hiring competent individuals in his first administration, and this time, “unless you are willing to lick his ass, you don’t get a job. Everybody understands that now.”
‘If he comes after us, we will fight like a dog and try to bring him down.’
John Keker
He is frank about Trump’s apparent willingness to disregard the order of judges. “This is the standard playbook for an autocrat, which is to undercut anybody that can stand up to him,” he said. “So if you’re a big businessman, you end up getting arrested in China or Russia. If you’re independent media, you end up getting shut down, or, in Trump’s case, sued for this and that. If you’re a lawyer who stands up to him, or a judge who stands up to him, autocrats go after the judges and try to keep them from being an independent source of power. That’s exactly what Trump is doing.”
The scary thing about Trump II — and Keker articulated this well — is the incendiary nature of his words, combined with his actions. “I think he’s inciting violence against judges by calling them these ridiculous names like ‘left-wing lunatics’ and so on,” said Keker. “I’m worried about all these people he pardoned. There’s a lot of nuts in that group. And there’s plenty of violent people. I was in the Marine Corps. I know violent people.”
Keker was wounded in combat in Vietnam. He hung his still-damaged elbow at a cockeyed angle to show me the effects. He said on his friend Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s birthday last week, he wore a T-shirt bearing the names of the dead from his Marine division. He was convinced Elon Musk’s emissaries from DOGE would commemorate Pelosi’s milestone by coming to San Francisco to take over the Presidio, and this is how he wanted to greet them. (Pelosi was instrumental in converting the Presidio from a military base to a park; Keker has served on the Presidio Trust’s board.)
Though he has a generally sunny demeanor, Keker has gone to a dark place of late. A voracious reader who settles his mind with serious fiction while waiting for jury verdicts, he recently completed “America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War” by H.W. Brands. Then he reread Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” a chilling counterfactual novel about what might have happened if the isolationist and antisemitic Lindbergh had become president.
I found myself nodding in agreement as Keker articulated the difference between Trump’s policies and his manner of governing. “I’ve said many times that I’ll talk to anybody about any issue,” he said. “I’m not convinced that I have the right attitude about foreign policy or about taxation or about healthcare or about whatever. You name it. But what I won’t do is talk to somebody who worships at the feet of Donald Trump.”
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Keker if he thinks San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie should be speaking up more forcefully against Trump. The veteran litigator instead provided the new mayor with protective fire. “Daniel’s been very smart,” he said. “Why pick a beef with Trump if you don’t have to? What I’m saying is, the lawyers have to.”
I admire John Keker for his clarity of vision, his willingness to stand on principle, even at some personal risk. More of us will need to follow his example.