Matthew J. Craig is a partner at Hecker Fink LLP. He helped launch the firm’s Los Angeles office and litigates in federal and state courts across the country.
Matthew leverages his broad trial and appellate experience—including in contract, constitutional law, copyright, defamation and anti-SLAPP, and Titles VI, VII, and IX—to serve a diverse set of clients. These range from large tech companies to nonprofits, from major universities to artists and other celebrities. Clients often call on Matthew when they want to push the law in new directions or bring a creative lens to a difficult set of facts, and he specializes in cases with sensitive political or media components.
Matthew has used his unique combination of skills to help build the firm’s public interest practice. He represented E. Jean Carroll in her sexual assault and defamation suits, winning two groundbreaking jury verdicts totaling $88 million in damages. He has long served as counsel to the Federal Defenders of New York in Sixth Amendment litigation against the Bureau of Prisons—the first-ever civil lawsuit brought by a federal defender organization in history. And he prevailed on an anti-SLAPP motion against X Corp. in a case seeking to suppress reporting about hate speech on the X platform. After obtaining dismissal of all of X Corp.’s claims, The American Lawyer named Matthew and John Quinn “Litigators of the Week.”
Matthew regularly serves as amicus counsel before the Supreme Court of the United States and the United States Courts of Appeals in cases regarding the First Amendment, discrimination, national security, and administrative law.
Matthew graduated magna cum laude from the New York University School of Law, where he was both a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar and an Institute for International Law and Justice Scholar. Following graduation, Matthew served as a Presidential Fellow at the Open Society Foundations and clerked on the Second Circuit and the Eastern District of New York. His writing has appeared in the Cardozo Law Review, the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
