Dechert hires ‘high stakes’ litigator to fight journalist’s ‘hack-and-smear’ lawsuit
US law firm Dechert has hired “high-stakes” litigator Kaplan, Hecker & Fink to defend it from being sued by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, over claims it hired hackers to tarnish his reputation and push him out of a job.
Dechert is being sued by the WSJ’s former chief foreign correspondent, Jay Solomon, over claims two of the firm’s former partners worked with hackers in India to steal and leak emails between him and one of his sources, Iranian-American aviation executive Farhad Azima.
The WSJ reporter’s tenure at the New York newspaper ended in July 2017 after the “illegally obtained” emails between him and Azima were published in the press, court documents show.
The lawsuit, filed in the US, claims Dechert’s former head of white-collar crime compliance Neil Gerrard caused “irreparable harm and damage” to Solomon’s reputation as an “ethical journalist” by either directly or indirectly disseminating the leaked emails.
The reporter claimed the “hack-and-smear” operation prevented him from securing employment as an investigative journalist in “creating a wrongful appearance of alleged improper, unethical and or fraudulent dealings” between him and Azima, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit says the communications between Solomon and Azima were distributed in a dossier, first to the WSJ, and then to other media outlets in a bid to discredit him.
Founded in 2017, New York firm Kaplan, Hecker & Fink describes itself as “one of the most formidable, elite litigation boutiques in the country”.
The law firm has worked on a series of high-profile cases, including in representing 24-year-old crypto fund manager Stefan He Qin, who pleaded guilty in February 2021 to one count of securities fraud.
Dechert and Kaplan, Hecker & Fink have been approached by Morning Wire for comment.