When plotting the escape from Biglaw, many associates set their sights on entertainment law. In their Hollywood dreaming, they imagine mingling with the hottest actors, actresses and producers as they write up contracts and negotiate movie and music deals.
We know that many a recruiter is dangling this prospect in front of desperate young lawyers looking for jobs. But the actual entry into entertainment law is not terribly easy, and once you get there, it’s not always so sexy as you might imagine.
One lawyer in Atlanta lived the show biz law dream, though. Cliff Lovette worked in-house for a record company, and then founded his own entertainment law firm. He used to represent some of music’s hottest acts, with Usher and Lisa “LeftEye” Lopes among his clients. He was a regular at the Grammys. He was the subject of magazine feature stories. His law group even had its own MySpace page.
But Lovette is not lovin’ it anymore. Now, the Emory Law grad is on food stamps…
This week we have another great position from our friends over at Lateral Link. Lateral Link is the exclusive search firm representing an elite talent entertainment firm in California, which represents high-profile talent — actors, directors, writers, and producers — in the movie, television, and music industries. The firm has an enviable client roster that includes some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry — you know them, you watch them, and now you can manage their legal affairs.
Position: Junior Entertainment Associate
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Description: Top Westside talent entertainment firm seeks junior associate with 2-4 years (classes 2006 – 2008) of corporate experience at top law firm with excellent academic credentials from a top 10 law school. Experience in entertainment transactions strongly preferred. Successful candidates will have incredibly strong networking skills, demonstrated ability to work independently, possess sound business judgment and discretion and be a self-starter who can handle lots of independent responsibility. Must also have a demonstrated interest in entertainment law. California bar required.
For more information about this position, please view Position #6201 on Lateral Link (or current Members may can contact their personal search consultant). Membership in Lateral Link is by application only and you can apply at www.laterallink.com.
“The winners never thank their lawyers,” said AmLaw Daily recently in an interview with James Cameron’s attorneys. But some lawyers did get love at the Oscars this year, as noted by Business Insider:
If you paid close attention to last night’s Oscar ceremony, amid the tears and triumphs, a couple of lawyers got their thanks.
If you paid close attention, we’re sorry — because you probably noticed Kristen Stewart hawking up something during her speech, and how scary Judd Nelson looked during the John Hughes montage. Overall, the show was painful to watch.
We stuck around long enough to see Best Supporting Actress Mo’Nique give her lawyer, Ricky Anderson, a nod. But when dancers came out on the stage to “interpret” Sherlock Holmes, we turned off the TV in disgust. Thus, we missed out on Jeff Bridges thanking his power lawyer, Bob Wallerstein.
Let’s take a closer look at these two celebrated attorneys.
Conan O’Brien and NBC parted ways in January. Despite rumors to the contrary, Conan’s attorneys — Patricia Glaser and Leigh Brecheen — told us that their client was pleased with his $32.5 million exit settlement with NBC.
As Leno takes the helm at the Tonight Show, Conan is moving on. He’s joined Twitter, and he’s working on a new show. Apparently, Conan was pleased enough with his settlement to keep working with NBC. The network has picked up a new pilot from Conan’s production company, Conaco.
Conan appears to have been inspired by all the time he spent with lawyers recently. The show is called “Justice.” It’s about a Supreme Court justice going into private practice. It will be filmed in Philadelphia, and — attention, unemployed Philly attorneys — they’re currently looking for “background talent,” a.k.a. extras…
Last week, we spoke with Conan O’Brien’s high-profile attorneys: Patricia Glaser of Glaser, Weil, Fink, Jacobs, Howard & Shapiro and Leigh Brecheen of Beverly Hills entertainment boutique Bloom Hergott Diemer Rosenthal LaViolette Feldman and Goodman.
Brecheen is O’Brien’s contracts lawyer and Glaser is the attorney O’Brien brought in when NBC informed him that it wanted to change his Tonight Show to The Next Day Show.
When the Conan-NBC showdown was happening, the media were critical of the contract that Conan had, in large part because there was reportedly no timeslot language. Though subsequently, it’s been suggested by people who have seen the contract that this is untrue, and that timeslot language was in the contract.
The decision to let O’Brien walk apparently came down to who was cheaper to let go.
Leno has an ironclad, “brilliantly written” agreement that guarantees his production company a staggering $150 million if NBC Universal axes his flailing primetime show, an insider said.
That led us to praise Leno’s contract and its creator Ken Ziffren of Ziffren Brittenham, and to question the strength of O’Brien’s contract.
On Friday, Glaser and Brecheen called to set the record straight…
On Tuesday, we tuned in to the late night show debacle unfolding at NBC. On his show that night, Conan O’Brien shared insights about the lawyerly wranglings. From US Magazine:
“Hi, I’m Conan O’Brien, and I’m just three days away from the biggest drinking binge in history,” he said during Tuesday’s monologue. “I spent the afternoon at Universal Studios’ amusement park, enjoying their brand-new ride, the ‘Tunnel of Litigation.’”
Noting reports that he is legally prohibited from bad-mouthing the network behind the mess (Jay Leno is taking over O’Brien’s time slot after his prime time show was axed), O’Brien joked in his monologue Tuesday “Nobody said anything about speaking in Spanish.”
He then rails off an insult in Spanish which translates to: “NBC is run by brainless sons of goats who eat money and crap trouble.”
The final deal includes a payout of approximately $32.5 million for Mr. O’Brien and roughly $12 million for his staff, according a person familiar with the matter. The agreement will allow Mr. O’Brien to appear on another network beginning Sept. 1, the person said….
NBC, which is controlled by General Electric Co., will retain the rights to at least some of the comedic material from the show, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal also includes a non-disparagement clause, both for the 46-year-old comedian and NBC, and a provision that was said to bar or limit Mr. O’Brien from appearing on others’ shows for a period of time, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
Jay Leno gets to reclaim his 11:35 p.m. show starting March 1. Meanwhile, David Letterman is probably just happy that Leno and Conan are monopolizing the late night news cycle instead of his own legal troubles.
What impact will this $45-million ruffling of the Peacock Network’s feathers have on entertainment law practices?
Two experts opine on what this means for the entertainment law industry, and the major takeaway lesson for talent lawyers, after the jump.
For the first time in a while, insomniacs are tuning into a late night show that doesn’t star Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.
Everyone loves a good fight. The Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and NBC squabble may be more entertaining than Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel have both knocked Leno. Even J-Lo has thrown some punchlines.
The National Law Journal has reported on the lawyers that are part of the fray. Patty Glaser and Kevin Leichter, of Glaser, Weil, Fink, Jacobs, Howard & Shapiro, are in Conan O’Brien’s corner. Meanwhile, NBC has Gibson Dunn slugging away, having retained power partner Scott Edelman.
The fighters have been trying to figure out what the definition of “The Tonight Show” is — if moved to 12:05 a.m., wouldn’t it be the The Early Morning Show? — and who has ownership of O’Brien’s intellectual property. R.I.P., Masturbating Bear?
The contractual issues may be sorted out any second now, according to the Wall Street Journal….
Why does Florida produce so many TV judges? It is because of their penchant, noted by PD Howard Finkelstein, for being rude and abusive?
The following are former Floridian jurists who left the state bench for the boob tube: Marilyn Milian, of the People’s Court (previously discussed here); Alex Ferrer, a/k/a “Judge Alex”; David Young, the gay TV judge; and the notorious Anna Nicole Smith judge, Larry Seidlin (not on air yet, but rumored to arrive in fall 2008).
Sadly, the world is now down two Miami TV judges. One of them, Judge David Young (pictured above), was trying to be The Gay TV Judge.
The country may be growing more receptive to gay marriage. But when it comes to television judges, it seems we like ‘em straight. Courtroom TV: Two of Miami’s TV judges get the ax [Daily Business Review]
If you’re leaving Biglaw and moving to New England to innkeep is not your thing, maybe you should consider moving to Los Angeles to promote music.
The American Lawyer has an interesting piece on a laid-off first-year associate, Brandon Dorsky. He was among the batch of Pillsbury Winthrop associates whose departures were inadvertently leaked by a garrulous partner on the train from D.C. to New York.
Dorsky was doing IP work in Pillsbury’s Los Angeles office. The Ohio native had moved to California with the intent to get into the entertainment industry and so he seized the opportunity provided by being laid off:
After leaving Pillsbury, Dorsky decided to build a practice geared to entertainment clients, while also managing musical acts. He e-mailed friends and business contacts looking for leads. Just three days after leaving the firm, he landed his first client, TRG Sports and Entertainment. A friend from the University of Michigan recommended him to the management company, which was looking for a lawyer to draft a recording contract….
“I’m out most nights,” Dorsky says. “I see five concerts a week. I’m out there looking for new clients and looking for opportunities for existing clients.”
We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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When plotting the escape from Biglaw, many associates set their sights on entertainment law. In their Hollywood dreaming, they imagine mingling with the hottest actors, actresses and producers as they write up contracts and negotiate movie and music deals. 
