Fox News Media has hired Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner Katherine Moran Meeks, a former reporter and editor at newspapers, as its general counsel.
Meeks will succeed Bernard Gugar as of Aug. 19, the company said in a statement. “I’m thrilled to join the most powerful and dominant news brand in the industry,” Meeks said in the statement. She declined further comment.
Gugar in the statement said his decision to resign after three years at the company “was a difficult one.” The network’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, thanked Gugar for his “incredibly hard work and extensive contributions” but said Meeks’s background makes her ideally placed to tackle “the legal intricacies of the ever-evolving media landscape.”
The career pivot is one of several Meeks has made. She clerked for former US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and controversial former Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski before going on to spend more than seven years at Williams & Connolly in Washington.
She joined Gibson Dunn as an of counsel in 2022, litigating complex statutory and constitutional matters in state and federal courts with a particular focus on First Amendment issues. The firm promoted Meeks to partner in January.
Before embarking on a legal career, she spent almost seven years collectively working as a reporter at The Day in New London, Connecticut, and a reporter and editor for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.
Legal Team Changes
At Fox News, a subsidiary of the Murdoch-family led Fox Corp., Meeks will report to Scott, as well as Adam Ciongoli, who the New York-based parent company hired in late 2023 to succeed Viet Dinh as its chief legal and policy officer.
Stephen Potenza, a former Kirkland & Ellis litigation partner hired three years ago as a deputy general counsel reporting to Gugar, will remain with Fox News and now report directly to Meeks, the company said. Potenza had previously worked with Dinh, Ciongoli’s predecessor, in private practice.
Meeks is the most recent change to Fox’s in-house legal team under Ciongoli.
Jeffrey Taylor, who in 2021 took on a newly created general counsel role at Fox, left the company last month to take the top legal job at Exxon Mobil Corp. Taylor’s former role has been eliminated with its responsibilities reallocated to members of Ciongoli’s new legal leadership team, a Fox spokesman said.
Ciongoli, who hails from a similar rarefied litigation background as Meeks, didn’t immediately return a request for comment about her hire by Fox News.
Litigation Docket
Meeks has handled libel and speech-based tort cases for journalists and media companies, Fox News said in its Wednesday evening statement. Her clients have included Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. and Perkins Coie, which turned to Gibson Dunn for counsel in a dismissed lawsuit filed by Trump against his former presidential election rival Hillary Clinton.
During her time at Williams & Connolly, Meeks was part of a team that represented Fox News in a lawsuit filed against the company by the parents of Seth Rich, a murdered Democratic National Committee staffer. That case settled.
She joins Fox after the company scored some key wins in the courtroom.
A “revenge porn” lawsuit filed last month by Hunter Biden was withdrawn Monday after lawyers from Dechert representing Fox and Fox News removed the case to federal court. That same day both companies, advised by DLA Piper and Ellis George Cipollone, successfully secured the dismissal of another lawsuit filed by former Biden administration staffer Nina Jankowicz.
Fox, which last year agreed to a landmark $787.5 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems Inc., still faces a $2.7 billion defamation claim from Smartmatic Corp. related to Fox News’s coverage of that voting technology company in the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election.
Kirkland and Mintz & Gold are representing Fox in the Smartmatic matter, which is tentatively set for trial next year. Smartmatic’s legal team is led by two partners at Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff that were once deputies to veteran Winston & Strawn trial lawyer Dan Webb—who counseled Fox in the Dominion deal—and New York-based boutique Kishner Miller Himes.