Practice Areas

From the first rights deal to the final wire transfer, we handle the full business of entertainment. We serve as production counsel across film, scripted and unscripted television, and live theatre. We represent the studios, financiers, and distributors, as well as the producers, directors, writers, and performers who bring projects to life. Our work spans rights and distribution arrangements, guild and union agreements, music clearances, merchandising, product placement, and personal-appearance and endorsement deals for both talent and brands.

What sets us apart is finance. Many entertainment firms cover production and distribution, but stop short of structuring the money. We don't. We advise on the full range of entertainment financing — slate deals, split-rights and gap financing, negative pick-ups, equity and co-financing, international co-productions, and "soft money" tax-incentive programs in the U.S. and abroad.

A book is rarely just a book anymore. The real value often lives in what it becomes next — the adaptation, the web series, the merchandise, the sequel — and in who controls those rights when the offers arrive.

We represent writers, journalists, and publishers across that full arc. For our author and publisher clients — from established national names to first-time writers, alongside several regional publishing houses — we draft and negotiate author, publisher, agent, and illustrator agreements, and handle syndication for newspapers and magazines.

Where we add the most value is subsidiary and adaptation rights. We identify who actually holds a right, secure the documentation to protect it, and negotiate its use — whether you're an author licensing your work outward or a producer trying to clear someone else's. We also review manuscripts for legal exposure, including libel, before they reach print.

Streaming changed how music makes money, and most artists are flying blind through it. We're not — our attorneys helped draft a landmark state statute governing how the performing-rights societies (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC) operate. We bring that depth to the people actually making and moving the music.

Our work is talent- and management-oriented: we represent singers, composers, and musicians alongside the publishers, digital distributors, managers, and regional labels they work with, from Nashville to the Mid-Atlantic hip-hop scene. We negotiate and draft licensing across soundtracks, sync, master use, and national commercial work, and we'll explain exactly where your royalty streams come from, and where they leak.

We also handle recording, publishing, distribution, label, and manager agreements, development deals, rights clearance, live-concert production, business formation, and pre-litigation negotiation. If it touches how music gets made, owned, or paid, we know it.

Games are one of the largest entertainment industries in the world, with deal structures as demanding as any in film or music. We counsel the studios, developers, and publishers who build them — through development and publishing agreements, IP and technology licensing, financing, asset acquisitions, merchandising, and e-commerce.

We also work at the front edge of the industry, where the law is still catching up to the product: privacy and right-of-publicity issues, in-game monetization and player-data compliance, and the open questions around augmented and virtual reality and AI-generated assets. We track those developments so our clients ship with confidence instead of guessing.

Whether you're an indie team negotiating your first publishing deal or an established studio protecting a franchise, we know how the money, the rights, and the technology fit together.

Intellectual property is the asset at the center of nearly everything our clients make — the song, the screenplay, the design, the brand, the code. It's also the thread running through this entire firm: our copyright work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court, and our attorneys have shaped how creative rights are protected at the statutory level.

We handle IP across its full life cycle — creation, registration, licensing, acquisition, and enforcement — for clients in entertainment and the arts, and increasingly in technology, where AR, VR, and AI are raising questions the law hasn't answered yet.

Our trademark practice covers searches, USPTO and state registration, maintenance strategy, and infringement on both sides. Our copyright work handles ownership analysis, registration of complex and multi-party works, transfers and security interests, and infringement actions. We protect trade secrets through identification, procedures, and the agreements that keep proprietary information contained — and we structure licensing and e-commerce deals built to hold value, not just close.

For more than twenty years we've represented the people who build fashion — designers, labels, agencies, and models — across every phase of a product's life, from first sketch to global distribution.

Where we stand apart is brand protection. One of our attorneys is a licensed private investigator familiar with the criminal-justice process, so when counterfeits surface we can do more than just send letters. We work with authorities and internet service providers to get fakes pulled from marketplaces and pursue the counterfeiters behind them. We also defend the other side of that fight: small retailers who didn't know a product image or brand reference crossed a line, and need to answer a cease-and-desist without losing their business.

Around that core, we handle the full fashion docket: trademark and copyright registration, trade-secret protection, brand licensing, manufacturing and distribution agreements, model and mother-agency contracts, labeling, photography releases, and gray-market and parallel-goods issues.

Most of our clients don't want a lawyer for a single deal — they want someone who handles the legal side of the business so they can stay focused on the work itself. For many, that's exactly what we are: outside general counsel managing day-to-day questions, negotiating the contracts that run the company, and keeping a genuinely open door.

A creative business still runs on the same infrastructure as any other, and we build it to last. We help you choose and form the right entity — LLC, corporation, for-profit or non-profit — and structure it for where you're headed. We draft the agreements that hold a company together: employee and confidentiality terms, handbooks that fit both the law and your culture, and the master-services, distribution, and partnership contracts that govern your outside relationships.

We handle licensing, distribution, copyright registration and infringement, gallery agreements, and more. Our copyright work in the arts has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court, and we bring that same depth to the everyday legal needs of working artists. Whether you're negotiating a gallery agreement, protecting an original work, or sorting out a work-for-hire deal, we know visual arts.

Our team's roots run through the field: a former adjunct professor at VCU's Graduate School of the Arts, a past chairman of the Virginia State Bar's Lawyers for the Arts Committee, and a Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts honoree. We've worked alongside non-profit arts-law organizations from San Francisco to New York, and one of our lawyers founded "Coffee with an Art Lawyer," offering artists pro-bono advice over coffee at a neighborhood café.

Technology moves faster than the law can settle, which is exactly where the risk hides. We help publishers, advertisers, software developers, and platforms operate in that gap, drafting the terms of service and privacy policies that govern your site or app, and keeping your data practices on the right side of fast-changing rules.

Privacy is the live wire. As a Virginia-based firm, we work daily with the Consumer Data Protection Act — including its newest amendments restricting how minors' data and precise location data can be handled — and we counsel clients navigating the patchwork of state privacy laws beyond Virginia's borders. We also handle software and content licensing, e-commerce, copyright and IP protection in digital media, and interactive and online advertising.

If your business runs on data, code, or content, we help you build it to last — and to comply.

Get an endorsement disclosure wrong and it's the FTC knocking, not a competitor. We keep advertising and marketing on the right side of the line, from concept through production, copy review, and clearance, across online, print, broadcast, and out-of-home.

Our work centers on what brands and creators actually grapple with today: influencer and endorser agreements that handle FTC disclosure and disclaimer rules, and agency-client contracts that pin down IP ownership, liability, and payment before anyone disagrees about them. We advise on compliance with the FTC Act, CAN-SPAM, ROSCA, COPPA, and the Consumer Review Fairness Act, and we structure sponsorships, talent and music licensing, and brand-protection deals.

We also design sweepstakes, contests, and promotions built to survive state, federal, and platform rules — official rules, filings, bonding, and prize fulfillment included. And we'll audit your campaign before it ships, not after the complaint arrives.