Non-L.A. Firms Try L.A. Practices in Entertainment

When Summit Entertainment LLC needed an attorney to help promote its new vampire movie, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, General Counsel David Friedman turned to someone he knew well: an old colleague from his former job at Paramount Pictures.

That lawyer, Nancy Derwin-Weiss, had moved to Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon, a midsize Chicago-based law firm with no entertainment practice in Los Angeles until she arrived. Derwin-Weiss' connections helped Wildman Harrold break through the barriers that have frustrated more than one East Coast firm's ambition to go Hollywood. “The firm doesn't matter as much as the lawyers there,” Friedman says. “At the end of the day, if you're going to try to attract work from the studios and major independents in the industry, you're going to have to have people who've done some of that work.”

Building a Practice

Wildman Harrold, which employs 20 entertainment lawyers in Los Angeles, is not alone. At least three other firms from outside California are using similar tactics to delve into the notoriously cutthroat world of entertainment law. Minneapolis-based Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi and Philadelphia-based Blank Rome have gathered well-known litigators with talent clients this year. Washington's Venable has dabbled in the practice while rapidly growing its Los Angeles office, which opened in 2006.

The approach of these firms is unusual. Despite the entertainment industry's dominance in Los Angeles, most of the top law firms based outside California have steered clear of launching entertainment practices, which traditionally have involved representing actors, directors, musicians and other talent in contracts and litigation, or managing lawsuits specific to the industry. The practice often comes with client conflicts, particularly for attorneys representing talent engaged in disputes over movie profit participation or who came up with the idea for a script. Also, most of the business clients, apart from the major studios, are middle-market companies that demand rates lower than large firms like to bill. Some non-Hollywood law firms have carved out limited entertainment practices based on their own areas of expertise, such as large corporate mergers or financing. But most avoid the entertainment world altogether.

“There are a limited number of attorneys in the entertainment business who handle a good portion of the work,” says Jay Cooper, a shareholder in the Los Angeles office of Greenberg Traurig, one of the few firms from outside California that has built a prominent entertainment practice in Los Angeles during the past decade. “So unless you get the attorneys who get those practices, it's going to be very difficult.”

To be sure, some outside firms have successfully built entertainment practices in Los Angeles. Greenberg Traurig represents high-profile musicians including Sheryl Crow, James Taylor and composer John Williams. New York's Stroock & Stroock & Lavan has developed one of the top film-financing practices in the region. Katten Muchin Rosenman has crafted a substantial entertainment litigation practice.

But the examples are few. Of the nation's largest non-L.A.-based firms with offices there, 37 claim that they have practices or industry teams devoted to entertainment, but most of these have fewer than five Los Angeles attorneys in entertainment. That leaves the traditional work to homegrown Los Angeles firms such as Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, Loeb & Loeb and O'Melveny & Myers.

“It's an industry like anything else,” says John Gatti, a partner in the entertainment and media practice in Stroock's Los Angeles office. “The decision-makers in the entertainment industry have been working with the same attorneys and are familiar with certain attorneys, just like if you went to Detroit and saw who was representing General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. It would be a group that is fairly well established in that industry. Not to say you can't break into it. But it's difficult.”

Robert Shuftan, managing partner of Wildman Harrold, acknowledged the challenges but said that his firm is doing things differently. Wildman Harrold intends for its Los Angeles office to remain focused on entertainment, both in traditional and new-media work, and “not to try to be all things as a law firm to all clients,” he says. “Multiple law firms have tried to do that in Los Angeles and failed.”

Hiring Talent

Wildman Harrold arrived with a bang by opening an office in Beverly Hills last year, having already drawn up a list of production clients in the entertainment business, such as Viacom Inc., Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Summit Entertainment. For years, the firm serviced those clients out of Chicago, where firm lawyers handled transactional work related to new media, studios, networks and technology companies, Shuftan says. Among the new hires in Los Angeles has been a string of attorneys rooted in traditional entertainment law: Fred Bernstein, the former president of Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Cos., who joined from New York's Proskauer Rose; David Ginsburg, executive director of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law's entertainment and media law and policy program; and M. Ken Suddleson, a former vice president of Paramount Pictures, who most recently arrived from Foley & Lardner's Los Angeles office.

The hires haven't gone unnoticed. “Fred and Ken I know very well. They're fine lawyers. They're transactional lawyers and high-quality lawyers,” says Cooper, co-chairman of Greenberg Traurig's L.A. entertainment practice. “And they should be able to build a very nice practice.”

Foley & Lardner, which launched an entertainment practice in Los Angeles in 2005, has borne the brunt of Wildman Harrold's poaching: In addition to Suddleson, copyright and trademark specialists Jimmy Nguyen and Carole Handler joined Wildman Harrold last year. Miriam Beezy, co-founder of the entertainment and media team at Foley & Lardner, where she is the sole partner remaining in the practice in Los Angeles, says the firm continues to represent clients in intellectual property, technology outsourcing, apparel and other work related to the entertainment industry. “I think we are still interested,” in building an entertainment industry team, she says. “But we just have some challenges.”

For one thing, many of the large studios have budget constraints or handle much of the legal work themselves. “Unless you have the relationships, and are within the industry to understand it,” she says, “it can be hard to practice in that area.”

Two other firms, Robins Kaplan and Blank Rome, seized an opportunity to rescue entertainment litigators this year from defunct Dreier Stein Kahan Browne Woods George in Santa Monica, CA. That firm collapsed after Marc Dreier, the founder of New York affiliate Dreier LLP, was arrested. In July, Dreier was sentenced to 20 years in prison for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars.

A group of nine former Dreier lawyers joined Robins Kaplan, launching an entertainment and media practice group for the firm, which has another 30 attorneys handling business litigation and insurance claims in its Los Angeles office. The firm's approach has been a bit more indirect than Wildman Harrold's. “We didn't target entertainment specifically as entertainment,” says the firm's chairman, Martin Lueck.

The group's clients now include Billy Bob Thornton, Meg Ryan and Jenna Elfman. Lueck acknowledges that the combination of movie stars and the firm's other work ' insurance, litigation and mass torts ' is a bit unusual. He insists, however, that the practices have surprising similarities, most notably in that they all work on contingency. “When we sat down and looked at our respective practices, they fit what we do like a glove,” he says of the Dreier group.

Additionally, the Dreier group suffered no conflicts of interest with studio clients, says Michael Plonsker, one of the former Dreier partners, now co-chairman of the entertainment and media practice of Robins Kaplan. Because the Dreier group represents talent, many of their cases are filed against studios, television networks and record companies, which presents a common conflict for large law firms targeting the larger businesses as clients.

“When Dreier was blowing up, we looked at a number of firms to figure out where would be the best fit for us,” Plonsker says. “And they assured us they won't seek to represent people we're up against. Most firms we talked to had a conflict here or there and decided not to continue discussions.” Plonsker represented Rosa Blasi, an actress on the cable television series Strong Medicine, in the groundbreaking case Marathon Entertainment v. Blasi, in which the California Supreme Court last year gave talent managers greater freedom to obtain commissions. Plonsker also represented family members of John Ritter in their medical malpractice suit against the hospital in which the actor died of a torn aorta in 2003.

Two other former Dreier litigators, Lawrence Hinkle and Andrew Kim, joined Blank Rome, which opened a Los Angeles office earlier this year. Both represent actors, agents, managers, publicists and other artists. Nearly 70% of these attorneys' clients are in the entertainment industry, but it was their litigation skills ' not their roster of famous clients ' that compelled Blank Rome to add the lawyers to its fledgling Los Angeles office. “It was not strongly relevant,” says Carl Buchholz, managing partner and chief executive of Blank Rome. “Certainly, the partners we brought in that have some entertainment practice are terrific litigators, and we plan to grow that into full-service litigation.”

Full Service

Having additional practice areas available, such as bankruptcy and financial services, was a big plus for the attorney duo, Hinkle says. In the past, they had to refer clients to other law firms for expertise outside the realm of entertainment. “The concept of an entertainment litigation practice at this firm was just a matter of us joining the firm and taking advantage of the relationships this firm has in various areas,” Hinkle says. “While we are known to be entertainment litigators, we very much so are just general trial lawyers who happen to represent people in companies in the entertainment business.”

At Venable, more than half of the 50 attorneys in the Los Angeles office have some entertainment clients, says Douglas Emhoff, the partner in charge there. “Venable's focus here in L.A. is not to solely focus on entertainment, although it's a big part of what we do,” he says.

In January, the firm brought in George Borkowski, who left Los Angeles-based Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, where he'd been a senior attorney representing the recording industry in the pivotal intellectual property cases A&M Records v. Napster Inc. in 2001 and MGM v. Grokster Ltd. in 2005. Other hires include Mark Fleischer, who besides being a lawyer is a former executive vice president of MGM Studios and is the chairman and chief executive officer of Fleischer Studios, which owns the rights to Betty Boop, and Michael B. Garfinkel, who represented the Association of Talent Agents in Marathon Entertainment v. Blasi.

The firm isn't stopping with entertainment, Emhoff says. “Southern California and California as a whole is such a great marketplace despite the recent economy. While entertainment is a huge part, we've done very well with cars, the automotive industry, and traditionally done a lot of real estate litigation, representing developers and contractors and things like that,” he says. When it comes to entertainment, “it's an area you can definitely do well in, but why limit yourself?”