The Nonprofit Caught in the Fray of Trump’s Attacks on Big Law-OxBig News Network

In the process of attacking big law firms this week, the Trump administration hinted at another potential target: a decades-old nonprofit that helps students land jobs on Wall Street.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sent letters to 20 law firms on Monday demanding information on their diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., efforts. All of the letters asked about Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, an organization known as SEO.

The letters, and the E.E.O.C.’s interest in SEO, may ultimately amount to no more than a headache. But in singling out the organization, President Trump has taken aim at a program that is core to diversity efforts on Wall Street and put a spotlight on the uncertain future of such efforts amid his escalating attacks on D.E.I.

“For several decades, that is one of the largest providers of entry-level talent that has gone on — especially across Wall Street — to grow up and be senior-level talent across all these firms,” Porter Braswell, the founder of 2045 Studio, a membership network for professionals of color, told DealBook.

“It’s an incredibly important organization that plays a very meaningful role in developing racially diverse talent,” he added.

SEO helps prepare students for Wall Street careers, including by assisting them in getting internships at banks and law firms. The highly selective internship program is different from many of the recruiting organizations that have emerged in recent years to help firms quickly live up to their diversity promises. Lawyers say it would have traditionally eschewed legal scrutiny because it was focused on providing opportunities, not fulfilling a target for diversity numbers.

But the E.E.O.C. said in an F.A.Q. this week that it also considered benefits like training or sponsorship because of an individual’s race to be examples of unlawful discrimination — even if those benefits were also available to others. While lawyers tell DealBook that they do not believe that guidance will withstand legal challenges, it could scramble diversity efforts already facing pressure. And that raises big questions for Wall Street.

A spokesperson for SEO declined to comment.

A growing assault. The E.E.O.C. sent its letter to the law firms — including Kirkland & Ellis; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; and Latham & Watkins — as the Trump administration was already ramping up its assault against Big Law. Over the past two months, Trump has signed a memo stripping security clearances from lawyers at Covington & Burling and issued executive orders against Perkins Coie and Paul, Weiss.

On Thursday, the chairman of Paul, Weiss — long seen as the face of Big Law’s diversity efforts — struck a deal with Trump to rescind the executive order in exchange for a number of concessions, including $40 million worth of pro bono work on causes supported by Trump

As part of the deal, Paul, Weiss also reiterated its commitment to “merits-based hiring, promotion and retention.” Paul, Weiss said it would hire an outside expert, within 14 days, to conduct “a comprehensive audit of all its employment practices.”

The firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, said in a memo to employees that the agreement was consistent with the firm’s longstanding principles. But many on Wall Street viewed the deal as capitulation.

At the same time, the Trump administration is broadening its efforts to rein in diversity initiatives. On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission said it would block merger proposals from companies that practiced D.E.I.

Some banks have already shifted the way they communicate about such efforts. JPMorgan Chase wrote in an internal memo Friday that it would rename its D.E.I. operation “Diversity, Opportunity & Inclusion.”

Diversity is a longstanding challenge for law firms. Last year, about half of associates at law firms were women, while 31 percent were people of color, according to the National Association for Law Placement, an industry group. That was up from a decade earlier, when 45 percent of associates were women and 22 percent people of color.

The numbers get tougher when you look at the partner level. About 29 percent of partners were women in 2024 and 13 percent people of color. A decade earlier, those figures were 21 percent and 7 percent.

Big Law pushed to improve its diversity efforts after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, spending tens of millions on diversity consultants and scholarships and working with organizations to help bring in more diverse employees.

Not all of those attempts were successful, partners at law firms say. Internally and publicly, there have been debates over the costs and efficacy of these programs.

The pullback. After the 2023 Supreme Court ruling ending affirmative action in U.S. schools made corporate D.E.I. programs vulnerable to legal challenges, firms began withdrawing. Trump’s election and subsequent Big Law scrutiny have put these efforts into overdrive.

Some firms say they no longer provide clients racial and gender breakdowns that are often part of a pitch process. Others are no longer holding diversity-focused events. Many are scraping their websites of D.E.I. language.

Karp’s deal with Trump may make it easier for firms to strike a similar deal or further expedite the D.E.I. pullback, lawyers say. (“D.E.I. will just have to wait four years,” one partner told DealBook.)

But pausing won’t come without backlash: An associate at Skadden said in a firmwide email on Thursday that she was putting in her conditional resignation unless the firm came up with a “satisfactory response” to the current moment.

It all raises big questions for SEO. Unlike some recent D.E.I. initiatives, SEO is part of the Wall Street fabric.

The program’s alumni work in the highest echelons of corporate America. They include Cesar Conde, the chairman of NBCUniversal News Group; Joseph Bae, a co-C.E.O. of KKR; and Frank Baker, a co-founder of Siris Capital.

And its supporters span the political divide. They include the Citadel founder Ken Griffin, who voted for Trump in 2024, and Frank Bisignano, Trump’s initial pick to lead the Social Security Administration.

It would be “very emotional” if SEO went away, Braswell told DealBook, stressing that he believed the organization would get through any pressure it faced.

For now, SEO’s efforts remain unchanged. Its class of 186 is expected to start their legal internships in mid-May.

— Lauren Hirsch

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

The first A.I. start-up to go public published its I.P.O. terms. CoreWeave, the Nvidia-backed cloud computing company focused on A.I. applications, is seeking to raise up to $2.7 billion at a valuation of $32 billion in its hotly anticipated I.P.O., according to a securities filing. Advisers have priced shares between $47 and $55 — for now. The company’s biggest client, Microsoft, reportedly chose not to exercise an option to buy nearly $12 billion worth of extra computing power, but CoreWeave recently secured a contract with OpenAI for that same amount, which also gives OpenAI a stake in CoreWeave.

The Federal Communications Commission said it would block merger proposals from companies practicing D.E.I. “Any businesses that are looking for F.C.C. approval, I would encourage them to get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of D.E.I. discrimination,” Chairman Brendan Carr said in an interview with Bloomberg. The extraordinary statement could force companies to eradicate any inclusion efforts. Such a directive falls outside the agency’s mandate but is consistent with President Trump’s aims to eliminate diversity initiatives across the country. Paramount, which is still awaiting approval for its merger with the Hollywood studio Skydance, recently announced that it would pull back on its inclusion policies, citing Trump’s policies.

The San Francisco Giants sold a stake to private equity while the Boston Celtics scored a record deal in a private equity sale. The Giants, one of baseball’s most successful teams, sold about a 10 percent equity stake to Sixth Street, DealBook first reported. Days later, the Celtics announced that they were selling themselves to an investor group for a record-breaking sum that values the team at as much as $7.3 billion. Both deals spotlight skyrocketing valuations for sports, putting teams out of the reach of trophy-seeking billionaires and into the hands of major funds.

Meta’s takedown of a tell-all tanks

Meta has taken extraordinary measures to hinder promotion of the tell-all corporate memoir by its former global public policy director, Sarah Wynn-Williams. But if making the book less visible was the goal, the company’s efforts seem to have backfired: “Careless People” rose this week to the top of The Times’s nonfiction best-seller list. It is the third-best-selling book on Amazon.

Did Meta’s efforts actually help the book?

Welcome to the “Streisand effect,” the phenomenon where an attempt to conceal information accidentally results in publicizing it, which is named after Barbra Streisand’s unsuccessful attempt to suppress a photograph of her cliff-top mansion.

On March 12, Meta published an arbitration filing that temporarily barred Wynn-Williams from promoting the book until private arbitration over whether she had violated a nondisparagement contract with the company concludes. A Meta spokesperson wrote in a social media post that the ruling affirmed that the “false and defamatory book should never have been published.”

The next day, conversation about the book spiked on social media, according to an analysis for DealBook by Kantar Media, the measurement tracking firm, which examined posts across Reddit, Bluesky, Twitter and other platforms.

“I think it’s clearly a massive contributor,” said James Campbell, Kantar’s head of digital analytics for North America, of how Meta’s response to the book factored into raising its profile.

While the conversation appeared to quickly move on from Meta’s legal victory, the amount of chatter about the book remained elevated. When the book appeared at the top of The Times’s best-seller list on Wednesday, several news outlets published stories highlighting the title’s success, calling it “the book Meta doesn’t want you to read.”

But concealing the book may not have been Facebook’s entire goal. Even best-selling books reach relatively few people. “Careless People” sold 18,549 print copies during the week that ended on March 15, according to Circana.

And the claims made against Meta in the memoir are not likely to hurt the company’s bottom line, said Brian Wieser, an analyst who has followed Facebook since 2004. Take the discussion of Facebook’s role in fueling political violence during the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Wieser published a report highlighting similar claims in 2018. “I think literally no one on Wall Street cared,” he told DealBook. “Of course, I’d argue they should have.”

Meta may have other concerns, like deterring other employees from writing negatively about the company or setting a precedent of enforcing its contracts.

Did the effort seed doubt? The temporary block on Wynn-Williams’s promotion efforts has nothing to do with the veracity of the claims in the book. The disagreement is about whether she violated her nondisparagement agreement with Meta. It’s also unclear whether Meta will prevail, especially considering that the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that nondisparagement clauses in severance agreements are generally not legal. But not everyone who learns of Meta’s arbitration victory may appreciate those distinctions.

“Having worked with a lot of C.E.O.s and executives over the years, sometimes the simple act of fighting back and making it look like you’re doing something — that matters more than what actually happens,” said Scott Bisang, a founding partner of the communications firm Collected Strategies, who has worked with companies including Twitter and Lyft. “If you do nothing, the perception is, well, maybe the book’s right.”

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