Jeannie Rhee is a dynamic litigator and former prosecutor with extensive trial and investigations experience who leads high-stakes civil, white-collar and regulatory matters, oversees sensitive internal investigations, and advises clients on threatening cybersecurity and data privacy matters. Jeannie’s practice focuses on preventing exposure and mitigating risk before matters become the target of a public action. While Jeannie is highly successful at keeping clients out of the regulatory spotlight and headlines, she is always prepared to litigate and take matters to trial when required.
A co-chair of the firm’s Cybersecurity & Data Protection practice, Jeannie frequently represents tech companies and others in cutting-edge cyber and data matters and litigation. She is also spearheading groundbreaking pro bono lawsuits holding extremist groups accountable for violence. Jeannie is a member of the firm’s management committee and deputy managing partner of the firm’s Washington, D.C. office.
From May 2017 to 2019, Jeannie worked with Robert Mueller in the Special Counsel’s Office, where she led the team investigating Russian cyber, social media and intelligence efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Jeannie’s team was responsible for many of the office’s significant accomplishments: the two Russia-related indictments, the prosecution of Trump associate Roger Stone, and the guilty pleas of attorney Michael Cohen and campaign advisor George Papadopoulos. Jeannie also helped secure the guilty plea of former campaign manager Paul Manafort. She served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel between 2009 and 2011 and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia between 2000 and 2006. As an AUSA she handled more than 30 jury and bench trials involving public corruption, health care fraud, national security violations and other issues, and served as lead counsel in a congressional corruption investigation.
Jeannie has been recognized as one of the Top 250 Women in Litigation by Benchmark Litigation (2020 and 2021); as “Woman Lawyer of the Year” by the Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia (2020); and as a leading lawyer in the white collar and investigations areas by industry publications. She received the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Award in 2021.
Jeannie’s representations include:
- Google in United States v. Google, the blockbuster case in which the DOJ and 17 states, accusing Google of obtaining and abusing a monopoly in digital advertising technology, seek to break up Google’s digital advertising business;
- Amazon in the successful settlement of a DOJ and FTC lawsuit over children’s voice information collected by its voice activated service Alexa through its mobile app;
- Washington D.C.’s historic Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in a landmark decision by the D.C. Superior Court holding that the extremist white supremacist group the Proud Boys and its individual leaders must pay over $1 million in compensatory and punitive damages for their role in a violent attack on the church in December 2020;
- Hearthside Food Solutions in an independent internal investigation of staffing practices following reports that underage workers who may have used falsified documents were hired by staffing agencies;
- General Electric in the successful settlement of a billion-dollar trade secrets misappropriation lawsuit against a direct competitor in the gas turbine industry;
Jeannie received her J.D. and her B.A. from Yale University.
Updated July 2023
