A bronze statue of Lady Justice holding scales is displayed indoors.
NEW YORK – A Dechert LLP lawyer faces a defamation lawsuit over a statement he gave to the press while he worked for another firm.
Both Dechert and McDermott, Will & Schulte are named as defendants in a lawsuit against Michael Sheehan, who represents the accounting firm BDO USA in a wrongful-termination lawsuit brought by Eleni Lagos.
Lagos’ case against BDO, where she was a partner, says she was retaliated against when her son suffered a catastrophic brain hemorrhage, alleging her salary was cut by $100,000 and she was fired months before she was to receive millions of dollars from an employee stock ownership plan transaction.
Sheehan was quoted in September in a Law360 article about the case.
“Any action taken by BDO with respect to Ms. Lagos’ partnership was wholly unrelated to the leave she was provided and due solely to her performance failures as a partner,” he said.
“It is unfortunate that she is now using her son’s medical condition as a cover for her own performance issues and to draw highly inflammatory and untrue inferences about why she was terminated from the firm.”
That remark forms the center of Lagos’ defamation case, as she calls it malicious, inaccurate and intended to damage her reputation. She has been unable to find a new job since she was fired from BDO in March 2023 and claims Sheehan has “further undermined” her prospects in the past year.
Sheehan had been employed at the McDermott firm at the time and moved on to Dechert after. The suit claims that he “acted with the apparent authority of Defendant Dechert.”
Lagos is represented by Filippatos PLLC and Mesidor PLLC in both of her lawsuits. BDO filed a motion to dismiss that case in October, but no decision has been made on it yet.
