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NY Attorney General Wants Madison Square Garden To Stop Kicking Out Lawyers

They should fight their battles in a court of law instead of this absurdity.

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Huge kick flies a group of businessmen

Get outta here, lawyers!

How many lawyers needed to be booted out of Madison Square Garden Entertainment venues — including Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall — before the powers that be in New York decided that enough was enough? Attorney General Letitia James is now on the case, and she is not at all pleased with what’s been going on.

Thanks to quite a bit of news coverage of a lawyer mom who was chaperoning a Girl Scout trip being removed from a Rockettes show, it’s now well-known that MSG’s CEO James L. Dolan has a policy banning lawyers in adverse cases from all MSG Entertainment venues until the legal matter is resolved. Though the measure seems spiteful, some courts have already signed off on the tactic. But all bets are off now AG James is involved. Bloomberg Law has the details:

Blocking access to ticketholders who are affiliated with law firms involved in pending suits against MSG may violate local, state, and federal human rights laws, including laws prohibiting retaliation, James wrote in a Tuesday letter to MSG executives.

The letter also questions whether the facial recognition software that MSG uses to identify individuals is reliable, citing research that suggests the technology may be biased against people of color and women.

“It is not our intent to dissuade attorneys from representing plaintiffs in litigation against us,” an MSG Entertainment spokesperson said. “We are merely excluding a small percentage of lawyers only during active litigation.” But when the lawyers who are “excluded” from MSG venues aren’t actively involved in the litigation — because of course not every lawyer is involved in every matter their firm handles — their removal is conducted purely for the sake of being petty, and AG James seems to recognize that:

“MSG Entertainment cannot fight their legal battles in their own arenas,” James said in a statement Wednesday.

“Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall are world-renowned venues and should treat all patrons who purchased tickets with fairness and respect,” she said. “Anyone with a ticket to an event should not be concerned that they may be wrongfully denied entry based on their appearance, and we’re urging MSG Entertainment to reverse this policy.”

Now that MSG Entertainment has provoked the ire of New York’s attorney general, we may soon see if the company decides to change course on its lawyer removal policy. Stay tuned….

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Madison Square Garden Pressed by NY AG James Over Face Scans (1) [Bloomberg Law]

Earlier: Lawyer Mom On Girl Scout Trip Gets Kicked Out Of Rockettes Christmas Show Due To Law Firm Affiliation

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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