(Reuters) - The lawyers representing Smartmatic in its $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox News, Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell tried their first defamation case just four years ago. But what a case it was.

As partners at Winston & Strawn, J. Erik Connolly and Nicole Wrigley helped wrest from Disney and ABC worth at least $177 million over ABC's reporting on a processed beef product the network dubbed "pink slime."

Now at 300-lawyer Benesch, the Chicago-based lawyers alleged in a New York state court complaint Thursday that Fox, Giuliani and Powell invented a fiction that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump and made Smartmatic "the villain in their story." The case comes after another electronic voting company, Dominion Voting Systems, brought separate lawsuits seeking $1.3 billion each against Giuliani and Powell.

When they took on the pink slime defamation case for Beef Products Inc, bringing the company's case to trial in 2017 as lieutenants of Winston co-executive chairman and famed Chicago litigator Dan Webb, Connolly and Wrigley had never handled a defamation case before. Disney disclosed the eye-popping settlement in a regulatory filing in August 2017.

The pair decamped to Benesch in September 2018. Since then, they said they've been building their own legacy and practice, as well as shaping the culture of a firm that first entered the Windy City in 2016.

But they haven't forgotten the lessons of the pink slime case.

"We learned how important it was to have such incredible, meticulous attention to the details when you're putting together the complaint for these types of actions, and to really make sure you have an incredibly strong case locked down at the time you are filing your complaint," said Connolly, the vice-chair of Benesch's litigation practice group and the co-chair of its securities litigation practice group.

Apart from Fox News, Powell and Giuliani, Smartmatic's 285-page lawsuit in New York state court also names as defendants Fox hosts Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro and Fox Corp.

"We are proud of our 2020 election coverage and will vigorously defend this meritless lawsuit in court," a Fox News Media spokesperson told Reuters Thursday.

Dobbs referred questions to Fox News for comment, as did a representative for Bartiromo. The other defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Both Connolly and Wrigley spent their formative years at Winston, with Wrigley joining the firm's Chicago office in 2002 and Connolly joining in 2004. Wrigley said they worked on the same floor, with their offices next door to each other.

"It's how we developed such a close-working relationship," Wrigley said.

At Benesch, they team up on work that Connolly said falls into three buckets - defamation cases, commercial litigation for very large technology companies, and breach of contract and trade secrets cases.

"We saw a chance to help build the brand of the litigation department at Benesch from the ground up, in the beginning, in Chicago," Wrigley said.

Joining Connolly and Wrigley on the lawsuit is Edward Wipper of New York-based Kishner Miller Himes. He did not respond to a request for comment.