Democrats and Republicans in the US have amassed large teams to prepare for a widely anticipated legal standoff in the wake of the ongoing 2024 US presidential election.  

The teams include a number of Big Law firms, with Covington & Burling, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr and Perkins Coie providing legal services to the Democratic National Committee and Jones Day working for the Republican National Committee, according to a report by Law.com. 

The election has been described as “already the most litigated in American history” by Covington partner Dana Remus, a top lawyer for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s campaign who is leading its legal election protection programmes.  

As the nation goes to the polls, Harris is neck and neck with Republican candidate Donald Trump, who claimed mass election fraud in the wake of his loss to President Biden in the 2020 election. 

Remus joined Covington two years ago after serving as White House counsel to Biden. She told CNN that the Democratic party has been “preparing since 2020” to ward off challenges from this election cycle, with a source familiar with Democratic strategy telling the outlet hundreds of lawyers have been recruited across key states. 

For election disputes, the Harris campaign team has turned to Big Law partners including Seth Waxman, co-chair of Wilmer Hale’s appellate and supreme court litigation practice; Munger Tolles & Olson partner Don Verrilli, who served as solicitor general of the US between 2011 and 2016; and Perkins Coie managing partner emeritus John Devaney.

Mark Elias, widely regarded as one of the toughest election lawyers in the US, is also involved, writing on X late last month that he and his law firm, Elias Law Group, were litigating more than 60 lawsuits representing Democrats. 

Elias, who spent almost 30 years at Perkins Coie before founding his eponymous firm in 2021, wrote on Tuesday (5 November) that there were 210 voting and election cases pending across the US, with cases relating to challenges to mail ballots, voter rolls and other election procedures. Many of them are in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Georgia that could alter the trajectory of the election’s outcome. 

Bob Bauer, another former longtime Perkins Coie partner, who founded the firm’s political law practice and has served as personal counsel to Biden in recent years, is also part of the legal team for the Harris campaign. 

The team has “already drafted thousands of pages of legal briefs that respond to dozens of scenarios”, according to an internal campaign memo obtained by The Hill. 

The memo, written by Remus, continues: “We brought together the country’s best lawyers for each type of challenge we will face and expanded our footprint with national law firms and hundreds of lawyers on the ground across key states, monitoring closely and taking legal action wherever necessary.”

Meantime, much of the Republicans’ legal efforts are being led by the election integrity unit the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee (RNC) launched earlier this year, alongside outside law firms including Jones Day and Dhillon Law Group.

Attorneys with key roles include Gineen Bresso, a former general counsel in Trump’s executive office during his presidency, who has been involved as an election integrity director. Another is Bill McGinley, who served in the Trump administration according to The Hill, and Steve Kenney, a former Jones Day associate who is acting as senior counsel at the RNC.  

John Gore, a partner at Jones Day, has been acting on behalf of the RNC in a case in Pennsylvania relating to provisional ballots, while David Warrington, a partner at Dhillon Law Group, serves as general counsel for the Trump campaign. Warrington appeared on Trump’s behalf in court earlier this year for litigation relating to the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.  

RNC co-chair, Michael Whatley, told reporters last week the party has also recruited more than 230,000 volunteers to act as poll observers throughout the country, The Hill reported.  

Both sides have indicated they expect lengthy court battles over the election result, meaning the likelihood is that the number of lawyers involved will only grow.