David Ellison needed more legal muscle.
After Paramount suffered a bruising July hearing in its fight with a coalition of state attorneys general trying to block its $81 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Ellison picked up the phone and called a lawyer used to hearing from CEOs in a jam: Beth Wilkinson.
Wilkinson has successfully defended the National Football League and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, as well as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh against accusations of sexual assault in his confirmation hearings, making her a go-to trial lawyer in high-stakes cases. She has won about 60 cases and lost four jury verdicts, two of which were set aside and one settled. She has never had a client pay a judgement.
She is now in the middle of the three most high-stakes media battles in years-she's the defender-in-chief of legacy entertainment companies grappling with industry change. In addition to working for Paramount, Wilkinson is also representing TV station operator Nexstar Media Group in defending its $6.2 billion acquisition of competitor Tegna, a deal state attorneys generals have also sued to block, and Walt Disney Co. ABC in its fight with the Federal Communications Commission over the network's broadcast licenses.
While some lawyers try to fight every battle in a court case, Wilkinson, 63 years old, is known for distilling cases in her courtroom presentations. Her candid, straightforward approach has routinely won over judges and juries.
Wilkinson, who left Paul Weiss to start her own Washington, D.C., firm a decade ago, is preparing for Paramount's trial, scheduled for March, even as the company has said it hopes to settle and avoid it and the upward of $1 billion in fees it will pay under its acquisition agreement. The publicity and noise surrounding the case will test for her strip-it-down-to-a-few-facts playbook.
For her other client, Disney, Wilkinson is playing offense. Last week, Disney's ABC sued the Federal Communications Commission alleging the agency's efforts to challenge its broadcast licenses and regulate its talk show, "The View," are illegal and an effort to quash speech the Trump administration finds objectionable.
She has a playbook for selecting jurors in cases involving large companies that makes a case simple and emotional. When defending tobacco company Philip Morris in class-action suits, for example, Wilkinson, who dressed in cheerier, lighter colors, asked prospective jurors if they would feel comfortable going back to their synagogues, mosques or churches saying they ruled in favor of such a company. Anyone who didn't had an out.
The daughter of a nuclear submarine captain in Ledyard, Conn., she and her sister were expected to defend their positions at the dinner table. After graduating from Princeton University on an ROTC scholarship, she 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. She later joined the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York and the Justice Department, working for then-attorney general and deputy attorney general Janet Reno and Merrick Garland.
Wilkinson was one of the lead prosecutors in the case against Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was sentenced to the death penalty. She argued that the bombing, which killed 168 people, was "the crime the death penalty was designed for." McVeigh was sentenced to death and killed by lethal injection in 2001.
She was 34 at the time and the case would propel her career. It also was where she met her husband David Gregory, who was covering the trial for NBC News. When he first approached her, she was uninterested, Gregory has said.
By the end of the trial, the two were an item and they married a few years later. Garland officiated at the Nantucket, Mass., wedding, joking at one point that when he told Wilkinson to improve her relations with the press, this wasn't what he meant.
She helped Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates prepare for a 2014 deposition, and since then, Microsoft has turned to her for any major case, said Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, which has hired Wilkinson for years.
She successfully defended the company's $75 billion acquisition of Activision against the U.S. government's attempt to block the deal. In a gutsy move she opted not to make a closing argument.
Wilkinson's calculation: she had cited math to support her argument that the combination of Microsoft and Activision wouldn't be a monopoly. The judge had peppered the government with questions citing it.
Microsoft's in-house lawyers looked at her like she was crazy when she told them it was better to stand down than make a closing because she could see they were winning. Wilkinson stood her ground, she recalled at a recent Microsoft internal meeting.
Whenever then-Activision CEO Bobby Kotick questioned Microsoft's strategy, Wilkinson would come to the phone to explain it. It impressed Kotick who asked that Wilkinson question him on the stand instead of Activision's own lawyers.
Earlier this summer, when Ellison mentioned to Kotick he was considering hiring Wilkinson, Kotick endorsed the idea.
"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 a number of trials while leading civil litigation at Pfizer and global litigation and investigations at Bayer. "Sometimes you are cutting Oscar-winning scenes and leaving them on the floor because they don't tell the cohesive story."
While defending Pfizer in a lawsuit over whether its hormone replacement therapy drug had caused breast cancer in a patient who died, she made a risky choice to play a video of the woman who had died before the plaintiff could. The video, which Wilkinson played to open the trial, showed the woman in her hospital bed admitting that she was warned of the dangers of the medication.
"A lot of people would be afraid to use that," said Moorthy, who is now general counsel at Argenx, a European biotech company.
Wilkinson argued that it was hard to know for sure what led to the disease-and quoted C+C Music Factory's "Things that Make You Go Hmm" in her closing argument.
She has a tight group of women friends, some of whom are also trial lawyers, and many of whom are former Princeton classmates.
Toward the end of the antitrust trial against the National Football League, the women attorneys on the case with her made her beaded friendship bracelets with sayings like "Closing Queen" and "WTVR Beth Wants."
At Paramount, Wilkinson will need to break down the company's argument that a combination of Warner and Paramount wouldn't raise anticompetitive concerns. The California attorney general canceled a meeting with Ellison to discuss a potential settlement this past week after The Wall Street Journal reported plans for the meeting.
A few years ago, Wilkinson and her team of lawyers were holding a video call with a potential client, according to someone on the call. On the screen were a group of men in suits. One had a question.
"Beth, have you ever been lead on a trial," he asked. Not missing a beat, Wilkinson responded, "You know, I can't remember when I was not the lead."
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