About a thousand feet away from the Oval Office, in their ninth-floor suite overlooking the White House, the attorneys of Boyden Gray are going all in for President Donald Trump’s agenda.
While some of the largest law firms in the world are in turmoil debating the appropriate response to Trump’s various executive orders suspending security clearances, cutting off government contracts and limiting access to government buildings, the conservative boutique firm is enjoying a period of success.
Over the past four years, the 15-person firm has emerged as one of the most visible law firms leading the charge to advance conservative policy priorities that have become a major focus of the second Trump administration. During President Joe Biden’s administration, the firm filed multiple legal challenges to corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, environmental regulations, pandemic-era vaccine mandates and more. Now that Trump has returned to power, several current and former members of the firm have been snatched up for various roles within the administration.
“They are really engineering cases that are moving our jurisprudence forward,” said Dan Epstein, vice president of America First Legal, the Trump-aligned group founded by Stephen Miller which partnered with the firm on several lawsuits. “When you need to push a strategy, when you want to challenge a regulation, when you want to challenge not just the regulation but the regulatory infrastructure, there’s no one else to call.”
The young attorneys remaining — many with experience in the first Trump administration and none of them over the age of 45 — are handling a portfolio of cases on behalf of clients ranging from Target shareholders to a major fracking company founded by the energy secretary. The firm is also representing the Heritage Foundation in a lawsuit challenging Biden-era workplace protections for transgender people and filing amicus briefs on behalf of Republican lawmakers on issues such as birthright citizenship.
Boyden Gray’s Trump-era moment comes as the president has directly attacked other firms with executive orders, threatening to cripple their businesses for retaining attorneys who have investigated him or taking on cases he perceives as opposed to his interests. Some firms have challenged Trump’s orders in court, while others have struck deals with the president — and nearly all have been wrestling with how to handle it. “What this involves is misusing the full weight of government power to engage in personal retribution and to chill protected First Amendment opportunity, which includes litigating against the government,” said Peter Keisler, a former Justice Department official under President George W. Bush.
Yet contrary to others in the legal community, attorneys at Boyden Gray say they see no problem with the president’s recent executive orders — even as establishment conservative lawyers have called them an attack on the rule of law.
“I think part of what the EOs were designed to do was to bust that informal cartel mindset that a lot of the big D.C. firms had,” firm partner Trent McCotter told POLITICO in an interview, describing a reluctance among large firms to represent conservative clients.
“I view the EOs as accomplishing several things,” he continued. “You have the security clearance part, which is absolute core executive prerogative. You have the government contracting part, which is something that presidents have used for a long time to try to achieve goals, policy goals, to try to effect change, to try to encourage government contractors to change their behavior. And then the forceful reminder of the value of having, at the big firms, having people with different kinds of political backgrounds and views.”
Meanwhile, the law firms that have sued the Trump administration over the executive orders have said the orders create a chilling effect designed to intimidate firms out of taking cases opposed to the administration’s interests. Other major firms that have struck deals with the administration have committed to dedicating pro-bono hours to support causes favored by the administration — which could end up looking a lot like some of the work already being done by Boyden Gray.
Boyden’s work
Founded almost 15 years ago by C. Boyden Gray, the former George H.W. Bush White House counsel and longtime Republican stalwart, the firm initially functioned as an extended personal office for Gray. Boyden Gray & Associates, as it was then known, mostly focused on lobbying, policy advice and strategy until 2020, when it transitioned to a more litigious posture. The firm changed its name after Gray’s death in 2023.
By the end of the first Trump administration, the federal judiciary was ripe for the sort of lawsuits in which the firm was involved. Trump’s then-record setting number of judicial appointees had created favorable conditions for lawsuits aimed at overturning federal agency rules and regulations unpopular with conservatives and challenging the use of DEI policies across the public and private sectors.
“It became clear that if you want to advance your goals … you have to be willing to sue,” McCotter said. “You kind of have to be dumb not to decide that at the very least a major tool in your arsenal is litigation.”
The strategy has been successful, though the slow nature of civil litigation means many of the firm’s lawsuits remain tied up in appeals. In December, the firm obtained a ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals striking down an SEC-approved rule that would have required companies listed on the Nasdaq to disclose demographic information about their directors or explain why they don’t have at least two directors that met diversity requirements.
Last month, McCotter argued before the Supreme Court in favor of reviving the nondelegation doctrine, a dormant legal framework that would prevent Congress from delegating its authority to executive branch agencies. If successful, the case would be one of the largest blows to agency power in recent years.
Others in the new conservative movement agree that the legal work being done by Boyden Gray is crucial for advancing policy goals, even beyond the Trump years.
“The next generation of Republican leaders are folks like Marco Rubio and JD Vance and Josh Hawley and Jim Banks and so on and so forth,” said Oren Cass, founder of the new-right think tank American Compass. “In that world, Boyden Gray really stands alone as the firm that is at the cutting edge of actually developing the legal strategy to accompany that political push and those policy priorities.”
Boyden in the administration
Despite Boyden Gray’s small size, three current members of the firm have been nominated for or appointed to positions across the executive branch in recent months, including managing partner Jonathan Berry, who is nominated for the top legal position at the Department of Labor.
Other recent administration hires from the firm include Wells King, now a member of the White House Domestic Policy Council and Adam Chan, now national security counsel at the Federal Communications Commission.
“The role that an institution plays as a talent pipeline is also critical,” Cass said. “And I think Boyden Gray … has really established itself as the place for young legal talent to go if they themselves want to then become leaders in this movement.”
“Being the guy at Boyden Gray is kinda like the Supreme Court clerkship of the new right,” he said. “That is an extremely important service to provide.”
Other alumni of the firm are also finding their way into the administration: Caleb Orr, now acting assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs; Adam Gustafson, now acting assistant attorney general for the environmental and natural resources division; and T. Elliot Gaiser, now nominated for assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel.
As the remainder of the Trump years play out, McCotter said the firm will continue to look for opportunities to help reinforce the administration’s legal arguments.
“Look over the last four years and see, what did more liberal groups do to support the Biden administration?” he said. “And that’s going to be a blueprint for conservative groups, our law firm, for what we should be doing for the next four years.”