Law360 (August 17, 2020, 9:01 PM EDT) -- California Sen. Kamala Harris may well have been BigLaw's favorite choice for vice president — if her donations during the Democratic primary were any indication.

Although Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren vastly outraised and outlasted Harris in the Democratic presidential primary race, Harris received significantly more in campaign contributions from BigLaw, according to an analysis of campaign contributions by lawyers and staff at Law360 400 firms.

Harris raised at least $1.2 million of her roughly $40 million campaign haul from BigLaw employees before she bowed out of the primaries in December. Warren, who was widely viewed as a top competitor for the vice presidential spot, outraised Harris overall by about $100 million, but only raised around $800,000 from donors employed at top law firms.

Harris owes much of her uncanny ability to part lawyers from cash to family ties and deep connections stemming from her career as a prosecutor and California's attorney general.

"Although [Warren] was extremely successful as a law professor, her contact list is going to be full of other law professors — not full of the richest law firm partners in America, the way that I assume that the Harrises are just much better connected to," said Adam Chilton, a professor at the University of Chicago School of Law who has studied lawyers' ideological leanings.

BigLaw's favoring of Harris shows that the industry, though it skews left, appears to remain relatively moderate. Lawyers at these firms tend to share more sensibilities with former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton than candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Chilton said.

Harris herself is married to prominent DLA Piper partner Douglas Emhoff. Her sister, Maya Harris, is a lawyer who was executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Northern California; Maya Harris' husband is the chief legal officer of Uber.

The California senator courted lawyers to great effect during her presidential run. Several Kirkland & Ellis LLP partners hosted a high-profile fundraiser in Chicago for her last year, according to the Associated Press, and corporate restructuring partner Jon Henes was her campaign's national finance chair. In all, Kirkland employees gave more than $143,000 to Harris.

The Kirkland fundraiser was reportedly headlined by her husband, and his firm's employees accounted for more than $102,000 in contributions.

While no BigLaw firm is overtly partisan, most lawyers tend to lean liberal — and that is especially true at the largest firms, according to an analysis of lawyers' campaign contributions conducted by Chilton and professors at Harvard Law School and Stanford University.

The scholars assigned "campaign finance scores" to each of the Law360 400 firms in 2015 based on their lawyers' contributions to local, state and federal elections from 1979 to 2014. Negative scores denote liberalism, zero is perfectly moderate and positive numbers signify conservatism.

The profession overall skewed liberal, but the study found that generally, the bigger the firm, the more liberal it is likely to be. The biggest BigLaw firms tended to be the most liberal, while solo practitioners tended to be more conservative.

Among the 20 largest firms, Jones Day was the most conservative with a score of -0.213 —still slightly left-leaning — and WilmerHale was the most liberal, scoring -0.837.

Those scores didn't quite track with contributions in 2016, when BigLaw lawyers donated far more to Hillary Clinton than they did to Donald Trump — even at the relatively conservative Jones Day, which counted Trump among its clients.

Chilton said that another potential reason for Harris' BigLaw popularity has to do with the power she will wield — regardless of which ticket wins. Obviously, if the Biden-Harris ticket wins, Harris will be the vice president of the United States, but if she loses, she will still be a powerful senator from the most populous state in the nation. As such, a lawyer might feel a little more generous knowing a donation may well lead to opportunities.

In this way, elections are valuable and fleeting moments to connect with power, said Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow for the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform.

"Because you only have one every four years," he said. "If you're not on that boat, then you're off the boat and somebody else is on that boat."

--Editing by Philip Shea and Bruce Goldman.

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