The elite law firms that struck deals with President Donald Trump to avoid punitive executive orders have largely retreated from major voting rights litigation, according to a New York Times report.

The Times reports that firms once considered formidable counterweights to executive overreach have adopted a low profile since cutting deals with the administration. Among them is Paul Weiss, the white-shoe firm led by chairman Brad Karp.

Norm Eisen, an attorney who has helped lead legal resistance to Trump's constitutional incursions, said Paul Weiss's support had been essential in the past. According to Eisen, the firm is now keeping its head down and declining to offer advice as Trump maneuvers to interfere in the midterm elections. "He was one of the greatest champions of voting and civil rights — and for democracy — in the country, and to have someone like that advising you, resourcing you and fighting for you was indispensable," Eisen told the Times.

Paul Weiss was one of nine firms that struck deals with the administration to avoid Trump's threatened executive orders, which would strip progressive law firms and individual lawyers of federal contracts and security clearances. The firm is now effectively sidelined, according to Eisen and a lawyer with direct knowledge of the matter.

"The void left by Paul Weiss is only a sliver of the impact of the deals the nine firms made with Mr. Trump early in his second term," the Times reported. "In exchange, they pledged to do nearly a billion dollars in free legal work to causes Mr. Trump champions, casting doubt on whether they would be willing to stand up to the president." For large corporate firms, federal contracts and security clearances are core business assets, which is why the threatened orders carried such weight.

According to the report, the final stretch of the midterm elections offers clues into how much damage Trump inflicted on the American legal system by brandishing threats from the White House. Once the go-to firms for advice on combating democratic threats, few of the nine firms are now publicly involved in the major legal efforts to "check Trump and his administration's attempts to meddle," according to a review of public documents and interviews with democracy advocates, election lawyers and voting rights litigators.

Critics say the silence from what were once democracy's most able legal champions has raised concerns about whether the profession is equipped to respond to an administration that the Times reports has "already begun to file litigation intended to sow confusion about the outcome of the election."

"Some of the firms have scrubbed their websites of their storied histories working on voting rights cases," the Times reported. "At one firm that made a deal with Mr. Trump, several lawyers are quietly volunteering to help voting rights causes, hoping that their bosses do not find out, according to a lawyer at one of the firms who spoke on the condition of anonymity."

The chilling effect has extended beyond the nine firms. Interviews with attorneys suggest that several top 100 U.S. firms that did not cut deals with Trump have also avoided politically sensitive cases likely to draw his ire, fearing they could be targeted next.

"I've been told, 'We don't do civil rights work involving the administration anymore,' and, 'We don't do voting rights work anymore,'' said John Powers, legal director at the Advancement Project, which litigates voting rights cases by joining with better-financed private firms.

When the Advancement Project recently filed suit with the N.A.A.C.P. against some of the Trump Justice Department's election-monitoring tactics, it initially had to do so without a private-firm partner, the Times reported. The shortage matters because private firms supply the staffing and resources that small nonprofit legal teams struggle to replace when they square off against the federal government in court.

"In some cases, Mr. Powers added, partners at firms working with the Advancement Project pulled back their support, dropped out entirely or agreed only to help on the condition that they not be named publicly," the Times reported.

"All too often we're having to find workarounds because we don't have the support," Powers told the Times.

The Times added that Paul Weiss and seven other firms "did not respond to questions asking for examples of voting rights cases or other matters the firm is working on in opposing the administration." Whether any of the nine firms re-enters voting rights battles — in court filings or simply by answering questions like those — remains unresolved.