What You Need to Know about Elizabeth Warren’s Lucrative Legal Work for Big Corporations

The Washington Post is out with a fresh look at Elizabeth Warren’s legal consulting work and the mischaracterizations her campaign has employed in talking about this lucrative period of her career. In May, Warren’s campaign attempted to get ahead of the problem by listing some of the cases that she worked on during her time as a law professor, “charging as much as $675 an hour to advise a variety of clients.” WaPo spoke with plaintiffs in the Dow Corning case in particular and highlighted Warren’s lack of explanation on “how her years of private consulting and legal work…comport with her recent statements while campaigning.”

A few of the highlights from WaPo’s piece:

“She was on the wrong side of the table,” said Sybil Goldrich, who co-founded a support group for women with implants and battled the companies for years. Goldrich said Dow Corning and its parent “used every trick in the book” to limit the size of payouts to women. The companies, she added, “were not easy to deal with at all.”

“But in about a dozen cases, Warren used her expertise to help major companies or their lawyers navigate corporate bankruptcies. In many cases she was brought in to argue motions, swooping in to offer her analysis and persuade a judge with her knowledge of bankruptcy law.”

“Warren has not released tax returns from the 1990s, when she did much of the corporate work. But court records show she was paid as much as $675 an hour, which was at or below market rate for her level of expertise.”

Warren has built her campaign on the idea that she has always been working for the people, yet her time as a legal consultant runs directly contrary to that as she fought to win favorable judgments for corporate clients.