Choosing An Attorney | Wendy Day Talks About Entertainment Lawyers

Yay, you're back! Hey everybody, um, entertainment lawyers. I'd like to talk about entertainment lawyers today. Um, let me start by saying that when you're choosing a lawyer You need to make sure it's an entertainment attorney. There are many different kinds of attorneys. There are corporate attorneys, there's real estate attorneys, there's the attorneys that sue when you have a problem— they're called litigators. But the type of attorney that you want for your career is an entertainment attorney. And my best suggestion is that you find an experienced entertainment attorney, someone that has done deals, the type of deals that you're doing or that you want to do. And what I mean by that is, if your goal is to be signed to a major label, you want to have an entertainment attorney that has shopped many, many, um, deals with major labels and has negotiated many, many deals. With labels, major labels, if that's your goal. If your goal is to stay independent and have somebody help you with your career independently, then you need an attorney that is understanding of that and well-versed in independence. For me, I have two different attorneys. I have a very powerful attorney out of New York for the deal-making side of what I do. And then I have an attorney here locally in Atlanta that I've just started working with who does, um, the smaller paperwork where I don't need to have a pit bull involved. Um, releases for videos, um, negotiations with artists that are having issues with other artists, producer agreements, side artist agreements, the type of agreements that don't necessarily need a power player, um, or a pit bull negotiator. You know, the funny thing is I've negotiated so many deals in my career and I always have a lawyer by my side. I don't do anything without an attorney. And I'd like to pass that advice on to you guys because it's not always what's in the contract that can hurt you. Even if you're able to read the contract and translate it into, you know, normal English, um, it's not always what's in the contract that can hurt you. Sometimes it's what's missing. And if you're not skilled in law and the entertainment industry law, you're not necessarily going to look at a contract and say, hey, where's this clause, or where's that clause? You know, the great thing about attorneys— and they get a really bad rap, I've heard some really cruel jokes about attorneys— but one of the great things about entertainment attorneys is that they their job is to protect you. So they look at every deal that they do almost like, okay, what, what happens when this goes horribly, horribly wrong? They're looking at, you know, you're looking at a marriage and they're looking at the divorce down the road. And the benefit to that is that if things do go wrong, you have an out in the contract. And that doesn't necessarily mean you have to take that out. It just means that it's there if you need it. I've seen many entertainment attorneys do this in management agreements. If you're working with a manager who doesn't necessarily have a strong track record of success, you might want to put some things in the contract that they have to achieve. For example, you may want to put in there that your manager has to help you gain $100,000 in income in in a year, for example, in your first year. That way, if the manager doesn't hit that mark, it gives you the right to get out of the contract. Now, that doesn't mean you have to leave. That just means that if they don't hit that mark, you have the right to terminate them. You may love your manager and you may only make $50,000 your first year, but you see how hard he or she is working for you and you want to stay with them, so you keep them even though there's a clause that says you can get out if you want to. The benefit is the ability to leave if you want to. Most contracts in the music industry are very one-sided against the artist, so you want to make sure that when you're given a contract by a manager or a record label that your attorney goes through it and makes it a little more, um, to your advantage, a little less one-sided against you. Choosing an attorney, how to find one, that's, that's the trickier part. Um, the way that I did it when I was coming up was, um, I read all of the liner notes on CDs by my favorite artists, and I looked at the artists that were priorities at their record labels, because I assumed that if somebody was a priority, they had enough leverage. And sometimes part of that leverage is having a very powerful attorney. And when I started my company, I wanted to have a very powerful attorney, but I was brand new and I didn't have the budget to be able to pay somebody $500, $600, $700 an hour. So I needed to find not only a powerful attorney, but one that saw the value in what I was doing and believed in me. And that wasn't easy. But I was able to meet with a lot of the guys whose names that I saw on the CD liner notes, on the booklets and CDs. Today that's a little more difficult, because we're not a CD economy anymore. So you're going to have to turn to Google, and you're going to have to do a lot of research. And for newer artists, that's not so easy. It's, it's relatively easy to Google Beyoncé's attorney and do some research and figure out who represents her. If you have friends at record labels, they can also recommend attorneys. I did a lot of reading of Billboard magazine. Today you can check out billboard.com or billboard.biz, and you can read the different articles that quote different entertainment attorneys. Um, there's also different guides that you can purchase that list entertainment attorneys. The problem with just buying a guide to entertainment attorneys or a list of entertainment attorneys is that you don't know who they represent or how powerful they are or how well they're accepted in the music business. And let me just give you a great example here. If your goal is to get a record deal and you've built leverage and you've got a nice buzz going in your regional area, you're getting, you know, between $5,000 and $10,000 a show, not just in your city but outside of your city, your view— your YouTube views are in the hundreds of thousands or millions, your social media is popping, you know, you've got over 100,000 followers on all the different, uh, social media, then you're at a point where, uh, if you're trying to get a deal where a major label may have interest in you, but you don't want to choose an attorney that has a really horrible reputation or no reputation with the major labels because it's going to make your life a little more difficult. Remember, when you're choosing an attorney, you're not just choosing the person who's going to represent you for the, for the deal negotiation, but this is the person that's going to stay with you more than likely for your career, especially the early part of your career. So you want to make sure that that person is somebody who is going to be there and has a good enough relationship with the label where they can call the label president and, and have a conversation with that person if your project or your career isn't going the way it should be going. But you also don't want an attorney that's so cozy with the label president that, you know, they're, they're best friends, they're buds, and he's going to do a deal that benefits his friend at the label more than it benefits you. So it's all about balance. It's all about research. Um, when I chose my first entertainment attorney, um, I found out what his roster was, and then I reached out to every artist that was on his roster because I run an artist advocacy organization. I run a community of artists that I help keep from getting jerked. So I didn't want to have an attorney attached to my brand who was somebody that didn't fight for artists and didn't believe in the artist. So I went through the roster and reached out to those people, and it took me months. You know, this is before social media. It's not like I could just reach out to somebody in their DM on Instagram. You know, I had to really go through different people to get to the person I was trying to get to. But I did the due diligence and found out that that attorney had a great reputation. The worst thing somebody said about him was that he was slow, and he was. It would take him days to return my calls. It would take him ages to, you know, complete projects that we were working on together. But the upside was that I trusted him. He was very powerful. He was well respected in the music industry. But not too respected in the music industry. But the best part for me was he stayed in the office until 11 or 11:30 at night, and I am a night owl. I get most of my work done after 7 o'clock at night. So I knew that I could call him at 10 o'clock and he'd be in his office and he would spend all the time in the world with me because it wasn't in the midst of his busy day. So, you know, I suggest that you put together a list of attorneys, do the research on maybe 5 or 7 of them, meet with them, figure out who is the best person for you. When I'm choosing an attorney, like I said, I wanted a pit bull. I believe in hiring the biggest bully on the playground to protect me from all the other bullies on on the playground. That doesn't mean you have to follow my lead, but that's how I do it. I just, you know, I want people around me that are very powerful, especially when I was starting my career and I didn't have any power. Now I've got a little bit more power, so that's not as crucial to me. I mean, it's still important, but it's not as crucial to me as it was, you know, within my first couple of years in the music business. And for me, I wanted— my goal was to, to pick an attorney and stay with him forever. Like, that was my goal. You know, things change, life changes, deals change, relationships change. Um, and I'm at a point now where I'm on my third or fourth attorney, um, in my career. I've been doing this for 24 years, so That's not unheard of. I know guys that switch attorneys every year. The problem with changing attorneys often is that you lose the, what they know about you and about your deals. You know, every deal is different, every deal is unique to the person signing it and to the label or the, you know, person across the desk that they're negotiating with. Every deal is different, and there are different things with it in every deal that you may not know that your lawyer knows. Like, when he negotiates it, in his head he may be thinking, okay, this is the best deal I could get now, but as soon as this artist, you know, hits a certain stature, I'm going to renegotiate. And they know exactly what they can get away with and what they can push. On the label side, and if you get rid of that attorney and you get a new attorney to negotiate the next deal, they may not know what that threshold is. So there is benefit to picking somebody that you're going to stay with for a while. Um, on the flip side, as you become more famous and more wealthy in this industry, you may be able to attract a different type of attorney and a different level of attorney. You may be able to afford somebody that charges $700, $800, $900 an hour, you know, to, to work on your, on your, um, uh, deals for you. I, I guess at that point it becomes, you know, what your needs are. And this is where communication comes in with the attorney that you have, because the attorney you have may feel that he or she could negotiate, you know, a higher level deal, or they may understand why you'd want to deal with somebody that has you know, a great relationship with Apple or a great relationship with Spotify so that you can do direct deals. All that to say, do the research, do the research, do the research. Find out who the attorney's clients are, speak to some of the other clients, find out what they love about their attorney, find out what they hate about their attorney, and just make sure that the good outweighs the bad, like anything in life. Okay guys, thanks for tuning in.