Cathy A. Harris learned she was fired for a third time during her daughter’s high school graduation. It was a gut punch, she said, on what was meant to be a happy occasion.
The former chairwoman of an obscure but critical panel that mediates federal employee discipline, Ms. Harris was among an early slate of federal employees President Trump fired without cause. She sued the administration and went through four months of employment limbo before the Supreme Court ordered that she remain fired while her case wound through the legal system.
“Right now, I’m really laser-focused on getting my case to a win, however long it takes,” Ms. Harris said in a recent interview.
As she carves a path expected to lead back to the Supreme Court, she has added a new law firm to her team of lawyers. The four-lawyer firm, called the Washington Litigation Group, is the latest to join a coterie of pro bono organizations that have emerged in recent months to challenge the Trump administration, which is already facing about 375 lawsuits, according to The Times’s latest count.
The firm plans to focus on clients with cases likely headed to the appeals process with the potential to set precedents strengthening civil service protections and reining in executive power. Two of its lawyers, James I. Pearce and Mary Dohrmann, even share Ms. Harris’s experience of being fired by Mr. Trump. Mr. Pearce and Ms. Dohrmann were fired from the Justice Department in January because of their work on Jack Smith’s special counsel team investigating Mr. Trump.
The new group aims to bring appellate expertise to the very beginning of a client’s case, an approach that its founders say will improve the odds of making a successful argument before the Supreme Court.
It’s a game plan straight out of the Big Law playbook. But when many large firms receded from this type of work to avoid drawing Mr. Trump’s wrath, it created a void.
“Our purpose is to help fill that gap,” said Peter Keisler, one of eight members on the firm’s steering committee.
“We’ve just never before seen this kind of systematic effort by a government to use all possible levers of government power against perceived opponents,” said Mr. Keisler, a founder of the conservative Federalist Society and a former assistant attorney general and acting attorney general for President George W. Bush.
Democracy Forward, one of the biggest nonprofits fighting the Trump administration, has also recognized the gap in appellate expertise. The group is opening its own appellate shop this week, designed to mirror those at the big law firms, and has already hired more than a dozen lawyers, said Skye Perryman, the group’s president.
The shift in pro bono representation is subtle but potentially significant in the legal challenges against Mr. Trump’s assertions of executive power, including the ability to carry out mass and targeted firings of civil servants and the elimination of federal programs authorized by Congress.
Now is a natural time to start thinking more about appeals, said Jeffrey L. Fisher, a professor at Stanford Law School, where he is a director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.
“Once the cases get up to the appellate level, that’s when people start to think about which one is going to have the right timing and package of arguments and facts that’s going to be well positioned” for a hearing before the Supreme Court, Mr. Fisher said.
The appeals-focused model was intriguing to Mr. Pearce, one of the firm’s four lawyers who was previously a longtime Justice Department prosecutor. Last year, Mr. Pearce presented the government’s argument in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia against Mr. Trump’s claim that he was immune from charges of plotting to subvert the 2020 election. He was among more than a dozen Justice Department lawyers who worked on the two criminal investigations into Mr. Trump who were fired in January.
Mr. Pearce is disputing the firing at the Merit Systems Protection Board, the federal employee discipline panel that Ms. Harris served on before her own termination.
“I think that a lot of the fighting will be on the scope and extent of a president’s Article II powers,” Mr. Pearce said, referring to powers outlined in the Constitution. “You see this in the independent board cases. You certainly see it, I think, in my firing and in the firing of other civil servants.”
Those powers are at the heart of the case pursued by Ms. Harris, who argues that the president did not have the authority to fire a member of a congressionally mandated independent board without cause. She said her challenge, as she waits for a decision from the federal appeals court in Washington, was not simply about getting her job back.
“It’s about much bigger principles of democracy and the balance of powers,” she said.
Seamus Hughes and Cam Baker contributed research.