In an Android Gradle build, how to exclude dependencies from an included jar file?

In my Android project, I use a library that comes as a jar. I include it in the dependencies section like so:

dependencies {
    ...

    compile files('libs/thethirdpartylibrary.jar')
    ...
}

I also want to use the okhttp library, which I include like this:

compile ('com.squareup.okhttp:okhttp:2.7.5')

(This particular version of okhttp depends on okio 1.6.0.)

The problem is that the thirdparty jar library depends on okio v0.9.0 and what's worse, bundles it.

As a result, I get a dex conflict error at build time.

I was able to resolve this by manually removing okio from the jar file and this seems to work. But I'm wondering if there's a way to do this in gradle.

My question: Can I remove bundled, transitive ( <- I hope I'm using this word the right way) dependencies from an included jar during build-time with gradle?