Eileen M. O’Connor is counsel in the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery LLP and is based in the Firm’s Washington, D.C. office. Eileen has extensive experience in high profile cases for companies and individuals, helping in the handling of securities and accounting fraud cases, contract disputes, product liability, internal investigations, congressional investigations and international commercial litigation.
Eileen is a 24-year veteran journalist with experience working for ABC News and CNN in London, Moscow, Tokyo and Washington, D.C. She served as chief researcher and producer for ABC News Peter Jennings overseas from 1981 to 1986, moving to Moscow and then to CNN in 1989. While in Moscow from 1986 to 1997, Eileen covered the fall of communism; Russian politics and business; organized crime; and the wars in Afghanistan, Sarajevo, Nagrono Karabakh, Ossetia and Chechnya, where her coverage was nominated for an Emmy. Her live reporting of the attempted coups in 1991 and 1993 won some of American journalism’s highest honors, as did her investigation of Al Qaeda post-9/11.
After serving as CNN bureau chief in Moscow, Eileen was a White House correspondent and national correspondent covering the Clinton administration, and most notably, investigations into campaign finance, Monica Lewinsky and the Marc Rich pardon. Eileen left CNN at the end of 2001 to pursue a law degree and help start the Legal Crisis Communications practice at a Washington, D.C. law firm. She has also served as the president of the International Center for Journalists, a nonprofit organization dedicated to training journalists to build a free and independent press in emerging democracies and to improve the quality of journalism worldwide.
Eileen advises the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, through the Naval Postgraduate School on incident response, and speaks on various international and political topics on ABC, CNN and Fox News and at international symposia. Eileen is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
Eileen is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia and Maryland.
Education
- Georgetown University Law Center, J.D., 2005
- Georgetown University, B.S., 1981
