The Trump administration has abandoned its efforts to use the power of the federal government to force law firms that had the audacity of hiring or representing Trump’s enemies to capitulate to his great and powerful will.

With a brief due this week, Justice Department lawyers told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that they were no longer interested in pursuing the cases and were voluntarily asking the court to dismiss them.

The decision is the White House’s most significant acknowledgment that the executive orders cannot be successfully defended in court. The move is particularly striking given that some firms opted to reach deals in a bid to head off executive orders that President Trump’s Justice Department said it would no longer stand behind.

Striking, indeed. Four firms refused to bend the knee to Trump. Nine fell to the ground and begged for his mercy, offering to serve him to avoid feeling his wrath.

These nine firms all failed a high-stakes character test. Their leaders faced a choice between submitting to a bully and doing the right thing. The firms are not household names to most Americans, but it is worth listing them here. We hope that clients looking for fearless attorneys and law students deciding where to work will remember which elite firms were unwilling to fight back. Meekness is not a quality most people seek in a lawyer.

The first firm to fold was Paul Weiss, whose chairman at the time, Brad Karp, undertook what Ruth Marcus of The New Yorker described as a “desperate” campaign to reach a deal with Mr. Trump. The other eight firms were A&O Shearman; Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; Kirkland & Ellis; Latham & Watkins; Milbank; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; Skadden Arps; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

For the benefit of the non-lawyers, these are the big names in Biglaw, where partners take home millions and n00bs who can’t count to 21 with their fly zipped a mere quarter mil. When I heard Paul Weiss caved, I was critical of its weakness. When others followed suit, I feared for the future of the profession. But four firms, under attack by Trump, refused to give up and give in.

The victories of the four firms — Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, Perkins Coie and WilmerHale — are a triumph for justice and democracy. The executive orders that Mr. Trump signed early in his second term were based on the lie that the firms had done something wrong. In fact, their lawyers were merely doing their jobs. They happened to represent Democrats and liberal groups or participated in prior investigations of him. And his would-be punishments of the firms had the potential to damage them badly. The executive orders barred the firms’ lawyers from entering federal buildings and meeting with federal officials, activities that are a necessary part of many legal cases.

It’s not easy to be a hero in Biglaw, but these firms demonstrated the fortitude that one would hope of lawyers. Clients will use whatever law firm they believe to be in their best interest. Perhaps the corporations that thought they could buy Trump’s love by paying him off through settlements of his frivolous cases will find camaraderie in law firms that, like them, caved at the first provocation. But now that the Nine are humiliated, revealed to be too weak to be trusted, too compromised to be worthy of the faith of their clients, what should become of them?

And then there are the winners in a battle that any law firm worth its salt would have fought.

Fighting the executive orders took courage, and the four firms deserve praise and gratitude for standing up to the president. They all risked losing clients and even having their firms collapse. Nine other firms folded and struck deals intended to mollify the president. The deals included promises to perform millions of dollars of pro bono work on behalf of Trump-friendly clients.

Praise and gratitude are, indeed, their due. But praise doesn’t pay the bills or the salaries of first year associates or equity partners. To the extent that Biglaw firms were once considered the cream of the legal profession, with their partners holding positions of importance and power, should their capitulation be forgotten and forgiven? They may not deserve the bill-paying clientele, but we have no say in that. We do, however, have a say in which firms’ lawyers sit on committees or run associations that exert significant influence over the profession. And when it comes time to pick federal judges, should politicians remember that they were the ones who dropped to their knees and begged Trump for mercy like the fetless cowards of the law?

To the extent lawyers have any say in the maintenance of our profession, what should we think of the Nine who collapsed in weakness? Do we have any say in whether they are held in high esteem or shunned as a disgrace to the profession? Even if we don’t, should their names ever again be spoken in hushed terms of respect or ridiculed as the embarrassment to the law they are?

*Tuesday Talk rules apply.