Wilkinson also leads Nexstar defense while representing ABC as plaintiff against FCC
Paramount turned to Beth Wilkinson after a July hearing in its fight with a coalition of state attorneys general trying to block the $81 billion acquisition. David Ellison called the Washington, D.C.-based trial lawyer — whose clients include the National Football League, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — to lead the company’s defense.
Wilkinson has built her practice on a willingness to take on tough cases, winning about 60 and losing four jury verdicts — two of which were set aside and one settled. She has never had a client pay a judgment.
She now sits at the center of three high-stakes media legal fights. Beyond defending Paramount’s $81 billion deal, she represents Nexstar Media Group against state attorneys general who have sued to block its $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna. She is also playing offense for Disney’s ABC, which last week sued the FCC, alleging the agency’s efforts to challenge broadcast licenses and regulate the network’s talk show “The View” are illegal and an effort to quash speech the Trump administration finds objectionable.
Paramount’s trial is scheduled for March. The company has said it hopes to settle and avoid the upward of $1 billion in fees it would pay under its acquisition agreement. The California attorney general canceled a meeting with Ellison this past week to discuss a potential settlement after the meeting was reported.
Wilkinson is known for a candid, straightforward approach — distilling cases and stripping them down to a few key facts rather than fighting every battle. “What Beth can do better than anyone I have ever seen is parse what is really important and have the guts to not use every piece of evidence,” said Malini Moorthy, who worked with Wilkinson on trials while leading civil litigation at Pfizer and global litigation and investigations at Bayer, and who is now general counsel at Argenx, a European biotech company. “Sometimes you are cutting Oscar-winning scenes and leaving them on the floor because they don’t tell the cohesive story.”
Wilkinson left Paul Weiss to start her own Washington, D.C., firm a decade ago. She graduated from Princeton University on an ROTC scholarship and earned a University of Virginia law degree. She served in the Army as a lawyer in the general counsel’s office at the Pentagon, doing intelligence, special operations, and national security work, and later joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York and the Justice Department, working for then-attorney general Janet Reno and then-deputy attorney general Merrick Garland.
She was one of the lead prosecutors in the case against Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people. At 34, she argued that the bombing was “the crime the death penalty was designed for.” McVeigh was sentenced to death and killed by lethal injection in 2001. The trial was also where she met her husband, David Gregory, then an NBC News reporter covering the case. Gregory has said Wilkinson was initially uninterested when he first approached her. They married a few years later in Nantucket, Massachusetts, with Garland officiating. At one point, Garland joked that when he had told Wilkinson to improve her relations with the press, this wasn’t what he had meant.
Microsoft has retained Wilkinson for years for major cases, said Brad Smith, the company’s vice chair and president. She successfully defended Microsoft’s $75 billion acquisition of Activision against the U.S. government’s attempt to block the deal, opting not to make a closing argument. Her calculation, she told a Microsoft internal meeting, was that she had cited math to support her argument that the combination would not be a monopoly, and the judge had peppered the government with questions citing that math.
Earlier this summer, when Ellison mentioned to former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick that he was considering hiring Wilkinson, Kotick endorsed the idea.