Litigators' Perspectives on Prince

Sharon Mayo, a longtime commercial litigation partner at Arnold & Porter in San Francisco who is now senior counsel at the firm, represented Prince in a dispute shortly after he ditched his name and became The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. The adoption of the symbol presented a problem for caption pages on court filings. “This was before the advent of off-the-shelf drawing software, and one of our secretaries had to hand draw and then photocopy his symbol onto the caption so that we could tell the court who we represented,” Mayo said in an e-mail.

The Artist certainly had his eccentricities. At times, he stopped paying his lawyers. In 2010, Los Angeles-based entertainment boutique McPherson Rane sued him seeking $50,000 in unpaid fees. See, “Purple Pain: Lawyer Sues Prince, Claiming Unpaid Fees,” The AmLaw Daily (Aug. 6, 2010). The following year it was New York-based firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler who filed suit against Prince Rogers Nelson over another $708,687 legal tab. See, “No Stranger to 'Controversy': Prince Sued by Patterson Belknap,” The AmLaw Daily (March 2, 2011). “[Prince] could be a challenging client ' he wanted perfection,” Elkin said. “But he was a creative genius, and he would use his brain to think of new and inventive ways to challenge his lawyers.”

Elkin admitted that he didn't always heed Prince's advice. And when he didn't, Prince, whom Elkin called a “highly responsive” client, wasn't shy about letting him know. “He would say to me, 'Michael, if you were in my band, I'd tell you that you're playing the wrong tune,'” said Elkin, a former vice chair and litigation chief at now-defunct Thelen who in 2007 joined Winston & Strawn, where he currently heads the firm's New York office.

Prince's displeasure would sometimes manifest itself in other ways. Elkin recalled once being urgently summoned in the middle of a snowstorm to Prince's Paisley Park Studios outside Minneapolis in Chanhassen, MN. Elkin said Prince brought him to a conference room for what turned out to be a three-hour tirade against the U.S. judicial system. Then he was free to return to New York. “'You can go now,'” Elkin recalled Prince saying shortly before he left.

Prince rarely called Elkin at work, but one time he did, and Elkin, then at Thelen, thought another lawyer in his office was playing a prank on him. “I get a call from someone who said, 'Hello, this is The Artist,'” Elkin recalled. “And so I respond with, 'Go fuck yourself.' This went on for a minute or two before I realized it was actually Prince on the phone. I apologized profusely ' I was so humiliated and embarrassed ' but Prince just went on talking. And then he just hung up. He never said goodbye, he'd just hang up.”

Elkin's role representing Prince began with a referral from longtime entertainment industry transactional lawyer Gerald “Jerry” Edelstein of Edelstein, Laird & Sobel in Los Angeles. (In December 2015, singer-songwriter Dolly Parton made a public plea to get Edelstein a kidney transplant.) In New York, Elkin often worked with William Leibowitz, another entertainment lawyer who advised Prince.

“We spent a lot of time in the courtroom,” said Elkin of Prince, noting that besides defending his client in depositions or his various copyrights, Elkin also handled contract disputes and advised the singer's companies, including doing some personal injury work related to Prince's chain of Glam Slam nightclubs. And then there were the assignments that came from Prince's entourage, like helping out a stepbrother after he got in an altercation with his ex-wife at a club.

Elkin, who has done legal work for other legendary musicians, including Billy Joel, Bob Dylan and James Taylor, said that as his practice transitioned to more institutional clients, he and Prince went their separate ways.

Other firms such as Davis Wright Tremaine, Fox Rothschild, Greenberg Traurig and Kaye Scholer also did work for Prince over the years, with L. Londell McMillan being one of Prince's most trusted advisers.

Brian Baxter is the Deputy Web Editor for our ALM sibling,'The American Lawyer.