Years before the law firm Paul Weiss struck a deal with President Trump over an executive order that threatened its business, the storied New York partnership made another fateful decision. It raided a competitor for a group of lawyers with an exceptionally profitable client, the private equity and credit firm Apollo Global Management.

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked most of Donald Trump's executive order targeting law firm Susman Godfrey, part of the Republican U.S. president's campaign against the legal industry, and lamented that other firms have been "capitulating" to what she called his coercion and abuse of power.