(CNN) — The Trump administration has decided to drop its prolonged court fights against four law firms with ties to Democrats, after it had sought and failed to cut out the firms’ access to the federal government as part of an apparent retribution campaign by President Donald Trump.

Despite Trump’s dislike for certain lawyers who had opposed him at the firms and his attempts to use executive orders against them, the firms – Perkins Coie, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, Jenner & Block and Susman Godfrey – had each been protected by federal judges in Washington, DC, who ruled against the administration last year.

Each of the firms, Trump said, had employed lawyers who had investigated or opposed him personally. He attempted to use the powers of the presidency to deprive the firms’ lawyers of access to federal buildings, secured classified information and meetings with federal agencies – all mainstays of Washington-based legal work.

The firms were notified by the administration this weekend that it was dropping its appeals, according to a source familiar with the decision, and the Justice Department notified the appeals court on Monday night that it and the firms wanted to have the cases dismissed. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.

Each of the four law firms in turn cheered their win, while criticizing the Trump administration attempting to chill their clients’ choices of who would represent challenges in court and behind the scenes opposite the federal government.

“The government’s decision to dismiss its appeal is clearly the right one,” Wilmer Hale, the largest of the four firms, said in a statement Monday night.

The firm had employed members of the former special counsel office of Robert Mueller that investigated Trump after the 2016 election. “As we said from the outset, our challenge to the unlawful Executive Order was about defending our clients’ constitutional right to retain the counsel of their choosing and defending the rule of law. We are pleased these foundational principles were vindicated,” Wilmer Hale’s statement said.

The administration was appealing its court losses and had been delaying proceedings from moving forward at the US DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Filings were due beginning later this week.

The cases had been some of the most shocking attempts at retribution by Trump for his own past legal issues, with Trump aiming at large and well-known firms with prominent lawyers who had ties to Democratic administrations and the party.

The executive orders shook the legal industry so deeply, that firm leaders across the country took positions on whether they would bow to White House pressure to avoid Trump’s wrath. Some — including Perkins Coie, which had sued to fight the executive order — made clear Trump’s opposition to a firm had the potential to zap its client base, force out business-generating partners and potentially shudder the businesses.

Jenner & Block, a Chicago-founded firm with large Washington regulatory and litigation practices and a former partner who had worked on the Mueller investigation, noted in its statement on Monday that four different judges in DC’s district court ruled the executive orders unconstitutional.

Still, the orders were existential threats. The four firms that chose to sue had to quickly recast themselves last year as adversaries to the administration, rather than continuing to hold themselves out as the types of firms with insider ties to the executive branch.

“Of course we defended ourselves when the President sought to punish and intimidate us because of the clients we represent and the values we hold,” the firm Susman Godfrey said in its statement Monday night.

“We fought for ourselves, but we fought for bigger things, too: for a Constitution that protects our freedoms; for a legal profession that depends on equal justice under the law; and for the people across this country who refuse to back down in the face of an Administration that seeks to silence and intimidate them—lawyers and non-lawyers alike.”

Perkins Coie had long represented the Democratic Party and years ago backed a now-discredited dossier on Russian ties to the 2016 Trump campaign.

Susman Godfrey had sued Trump contacts and Fox News after the 2020 election on behalf of the voting machine company Dominion. The Fox News defamation lawsuit resulted in a landmark settlement where the right-wing media outlet agreed to pay $787 million.

The four firms that sued had one thing in common: well-known work in Washington, especially in litigation.

Yet other national law firms under threat of similar Trump executive orders cut deals with the administration and changed their approach, especially by shifting the political leanings in the pro bono work they were willing to do, from liberal causes to more conservative ones.

Several prominent firms, including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and Kirkland & Ellis, became known as “the capitulating firms” across the industry, after publicly announcing deals with the Trump administration.

“The Government has capitulated, which is a fitting end to its plainly unconstitutional attack,” Susman Godfrey’s statement said.

Though the executive orders didn’t survive in court, they have widely curtailed large American law firms’ willingness to oppose the administration and represent progressive causes publicly.

Top Justice Department lawyers from the Biden and Obama administrations, for instance, have also found more difficulty in landing or staying at large law firms, as would be typical after prior administration changeovers in Washington, with some starting their own small white collar firms instead.

The Justice Department is still pushing in court as of Monday for its ability to pull the security clearance of lawyer Mark Zaid, who runs a small self-named firm and regularly represents government whistleblowers. Zaid won a case at the lower court in DC challenging a Trump executive action targeting him, but the Justice Department appealed.

Zaid, noting the Justice Department dropping the cases against the four larger law firms, said on Monday, “My role is no different. I’m a lawyer representing clients yet I’ve been targeted for just doing my job protecting the rule of law.”

Zaid’s case still is set to be heard by the DC Circuit in the coming weeks.

“No president is permitted to broadly target or punish groups without appropriate due process, even under the guise of national security,” Zaid’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement on Monday.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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