Since the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, reignited a media frenzy and national debate over gun control, law firms representing clients on either side of the issue have been swept up in the discussion and, at times, ire.

In late February, Holland & Hart was singled out by a conservative website, Washington Free Beacon, after one of the firm's partners, Jason Crow, attacked the gun lobby during his congressional run as a Democrat. The article noted that the 460-lawyer firm has lobbied and done legal work for gun interests during his time as a partner. Holland & Hart lawyers lobbied for the National Shooting Sports Foundation and Magpul Industries, a manufacturer of large-capacity ammunition magazines like those used by the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooter, according to the article.

Holland & Hart spokeswoman Tracy Atkinson initially declined to comment on specific representations in response to a question from The American Lawyer about whether its work on behalf of gun manufacturers could have consequences for recruiting. The next day, she said the firm had revised its thinking.

“Embedded in our firm culture is the belief that all clients deserve representation,” Atkinson wrote. “Holland & Hart has a proud tradition of supporting our lawyers to work on behalf of those clients and causes about which they are passionate. The firm does not condition that support on what is politically expedient, whether an issue or case is controversial, or what side of a case the attorney wishes to represent, subject of course to ethical conflict rules.”

At other Big Law firms that represent gun manufacturers, ammunition makers or their investment companies—including Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy; Schulte Roth & Zabel; and Husch Blackwell—lawyers either did not respond to inquiries, or declined to speak about the topic.

But James Vogts, a partner at Chicago-based Swanson, Martin & Bell, has few concerns about any backlash against his firm's docket, which includes defending Remington Arms Co. in cases scattered across the nation's courts.

“These are fascinating cases to work on,” Vogts says.

He predicts zero likelihood that recruits or other clients would be deterred from seeking to work with Swanson Martin because of the firm's representation of gun manufacturers—and even scoffs at the notion.

“Wall Street was the bogeyman a few years ago,” he says, referring to the Occupy Wall Street movement, a worldwide protest against global economic inequality. Yet Wall Street firms had no trouble recruiting promising, debt-laden law school grads, Vogts says.

For many Big Law firms, representing those working against the gun industry on a pro bono basis is the more appealing choice. Prior to the Parkland shooting, Wall Street law firms lined up in 2016 to participate in a coalition organized to develop gun-control litigation strategies. The group includes Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Covington & Burling; Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer; O'Melveny & Myers; Dentons; Munger, Tolles & Olson; and Hogan Lovells.

“We speak every month,” says H. Christopher Boehning, a Paul Weiss partner, about the coalition participants. The coalition is preparing a challenge of concealed carry laws, he says. Plaintiffs against gun manufacturers face an uphill challenge, he concedes, because of the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2005. At that time, a National Rifle Association official called it “the most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in 20 years,” according to a Newsweek account. The law protects the gun industry from “the usual forces of exposure to liability,” and guards it “against any legal scrutiny,” Boehning says.

Ultimately, the coalition will succeed on a large scale only if claims fall into one of the handful of exceptions to the PLCAA's blanket protections for gun manufacturers, which potentially could allow for claims against a seller based on the negligent entrustment doctrine—allegations that one party provided a product to another while knowing the receiving party was likely to injure someone.

The attorneys representing the families of survivors of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in their lawsuit against gun manufacturers Remington and Bushmaster have pursued claims using that doctrine. The Sandy Hook plaintiffs claim the gunmakers knew their product was dangerous but sold it anyway to the shooter who killed 20 children and six adults at the school.

A trial judge already dismissed their claims based on the PLCAA's broad prohibitions, but gun-control advocates nationwide are hoping for a different outcome with the Connecticut state appeals court, according to Timothy Lytton, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, who has written extensively about gun-related litigation. Ultimately, the Sandy Hook case could go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lytton expresses little optimism that gun-control advocates will succeed in the courts generally, given the PLCAA's protections for gun manufacturers. “Nothing has happened” in the wake of the Parkland shooting “that makes me think that there is a major shift” coming among lawmakers, Lytton says. Perhaps, the reinvigorated push for a halt to mass shootings could begin to influence judges, he says.

“If I were on the plaintiffs side, I would at least hope that judges might be starting to change their views on if they should be dismissing these cases out of hand,” Lytton says. If plaintiffs could get cases to trial, even if they were to lose, they would have the opportunity to engage in discovery and garner publicity that would help their cause. “It would put this issue—and keep it—on the agenda. The idea is to put pressure on manufacturers,” Lytton says.

For the lawyers representing gun manufacturers, Lytton says, “I'd be sticking as close to PLCAA as possible. PLCAA was designed to shut this down.”

For most defense firms representing gun manufacturing, that seems to be the strategy—and, for some, also staying as far away as possible from the public's attention.