Founded last year by longtime Democratic operative Marc Elias — he was Hillary Clinton’s legal counsel during her failed 2016 campaign — the firm has become the central node of the official Democratic Party’s legal strategy. With 80 lawyers and 51 support staff, the firm says it’s the largest private law firm in the country, solely dedicated to “helping Democrats win, citizens vote, and progressives make change.” Democratic candidates and their affiliated groups have funneled at least $21 million into the firm’s coffers this cycle so far, public filings with the Federal Election Commission show. The firm now represents 950 clients, which include the Democratic National Committee; the Democratic campaigning committees helping to elect senators, representatives, governors, secretaries of state, and attorneys general; and at least 150 House and Senate campaigns and members of Congress. And it’s clear, from interviews with nine of the firm’s 15 top partners, that Elias’ attorneys see their mission as making a last stand for democracy — a task that in their view requires giving election denialism (and Republicans) no quarter in court….
As Elias sees it: Game on — he relishes the trench warfare. In almost three decades of practicing law, he’s earned more than a few critics. On the left, he’s been charged with exaggerating his wins in court and making bad precedent. Civil rights lawyers distance themselves from his work, noting his loyalties to the Democratic machine. On the right, he’s largely pilloried as a partisan hack — but some will admit that his central coordinating role is giving Democrats an edge. As former Trump adviser Steve Bannon says of Elias on his streaming show, “The War Room,” “He’s the standard. We gotta match that guy.” Then there’s Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who tells her viewers one night in November, “Republicans, though, come on, they need their own version of Marc Elias. Complain about him, but he’s pretty successful.”…
When the firm launched in September 2021, the country was still reeling from Jan. 6. The attack on the Capitol was the culmination of a monthslong effort by Donald Trump and his allies to interfere with the results of the election — an effort that cut directly through the court system. Trump brought 64 lawsuits advancing his baseless claims that the results were fraudulent, but he lost all but one of those lawsuits (and the one he did win wasn’t consequential to the outcome of the election). But the former president’s conspiracies still found room to propagate among Americans, thousands of whom made the trip to D.C. for a rally that ultimately turned deadly. Looking out at this chaos, Elias says, he decided it was time to start a new endeavor that would focus solely on this political crisis. So he convinced 10 partners and three other lawyers at Perkins Coie, including Nkwonta, to splinter off from the law firm where Elias had built his reputation among Democratic Party figures. And with that, the Elias Law Group was formed. (Previously, in 2020, Elias had also founded Democracy Docket.)…
As the fights over granular election procedures become more and more protracted, there is a growing concern among several voting rights lawyers and academics I spoke to that the work that civil rights organizations have undertaken over the last century will be swept under the rug. They argue the duty of election lawyers like Elias is to advance the interests of the candidates he represents, whereas voting rights lawyers focus on the broader non-partisan goal of defending voters of color.
Sherrilyn Ifill, the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a longtime voting rights lawyer, says that often means being willing to sue Democrats who introduce hurdles to the ballot, too, as she did against Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards in 2020. “You don’t just wake up and become a voting rights lawyer,” Ifill says in a phone interview. “There’s a very particular way of doing that work, and it is deep in community. … Importantly, we jealously protect the Civil Rights statutes, for which our clients marched and bled and died.”
But, she notes, the Republican Party and journalists are also to blame for papering over discriminatory laws with the veil of partisanship.