Dive Brief:

• In-house counsel trying to stay on top of the flurry of executive orders President Trump has been signing since taking office might find a useful resource in a tracker published by Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
• The 900-person law firm, which focuses on corporate clients, learned from the start of the first Trump administration and the Biden administration that keeping up with a surge of front-loaded orders could be a challenge.
• “We launched our Trump Executive Order Tracker in anticipation of President Trump signing an unprecedented number of executive orders and actions once taking office,” Tom McCarthy, head of Akin’s regulatory group, told Legal Dive in an email. After just the first day, the tracker was viewed more than 150,000 times, he said. “The response … has been phenomenal.”

Dive Insight:

Going into the close of Trump’s first week in office the administration released 42 executive orders.  

In this first batch are the president’s opening shots at high-profile battles that could end up defining his presidency, like his order to end birthright citizenship, which triggered suits filed by attorneys general in more than 20 states to stop the action on constitutional grounds. The U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington issued a temporary restraining order a day later. 

For in-house counsel, much of the focus will be on the orders impacting business. Among these is a directive to federal agencies to end diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the private sector. 

“The heads of all agencies, with the assistance of the Attorney General, shall take all appropriate action with respect to the operations of their agencies to advance in the private sector the policy of individual initiative, excellence, and hard work,” the executive order says.

The order reflects a push among critics to challenge DEI initiatives in the private sector after the Supreme Court in 2022 shot down Harvard University’s admissions policy for minority applicants. Although the decision said nothing about private-sector employment, plaintiffs have been hammering companies with lawsuits alleging their DEI programs are discriminatory. 

Trump’s aggressive push to curb illegal immigration and deport people working in the country without adequate documentation is expected to have far-reaching effects on companies, particularly in the agriculture, construction, hospitality and retail sectors. 

In California, for example, workers who are in demand because of the state’s citrus harvest aren’t showing up to job sites out of deportation fears. That’s “halted the area's citrus harvest,” the California Farm Bureau says in an NBC Bay Area report. 

In construction, immigrants make up about a quarter of the labor force, according to Pew research, so putting a target on these workers is expected to exacerbate an already severe labor shortage.    

“Home improvement projects … might become unaffordable to the point where people feel they can't do them anymore,” Stephen Brown, deputy chief North America economist with Capital Economics, said in a CBS News report. “And the lack of supply will be a big issue there, too." 

In one way or another, virtually all of the orders will impact business, but among those that could have an immediate impact are directives on trade policy, taxes and energy. 

Trump’s “America first” trade policy, for example, which directs agency heads to look at the reasons for the persistent trade deficits the United States has with other countries, is expected to serve as the basis for the aggressive tariffs he’s talked about imposing on other countries and could lead to a revamping of trade agreements and even returning China to the government’s list of currency manipulators. These and other actions could reverberate significantly on companies. 

“Some of America’s closest partners and allies are now moving forward in an effort to create market opportunities that do not include America,” Brookings analyst Mireya Solís says in a report.    

In-house counsel will have their work cut out for them in the months ahead as they sort out the implications of the administration’s actions on their companies, but keeping tabs on the orders will likely be made easier with the tracker. That, at least, is the law firm’s hope.  

It gives “in-house attorneys … a flexible and searchable tool to quickly identify which of the executive orders are applicable to their business,” McCarthy said. 

The law firm Snell & Wilmer has launched an executive order resource as well.