music lawyers

In June, Dylan Bourne, who manages JELEEL! and Dwellers, opened Instagram to find his inbox flooded with messages. Earlier that day, he had posted an exasperated friend’s observation about the habits of some music industry attorneys: “Seems like the standard with all these lawyers is [to] sign a million things you can’t possibly time manage.” Many of Bourne’s followers were quietly harboring the same frustration, and they started sending him their own stories of long delays and extended silences. 

“I just had this feeling that if both myself and another respected peer were both experiencing these same difficulties, we couldn’t be alone, and I was curious to hear other people’s perspectives on the matter,” Bourne tells Billboard. “I could have never imagined the volume of responses that came in from fellow managers, artists, producers, and even lawyers.” 

While attorneys operate almost entirely behind the scenes in the music industry, they wield a significant amount of power. Artists require a lawyer before they can sign a record deal, and “the lawyer controls that conversation in most cases,” explains one senior label executive. As a result, “Lawyers are the center of A&R.” 

With great power comes great responsibility. But “there is no scrutiny on lawyers,” says one artist manager who requested anonymity to speak freely. “There’s no way to hold them accountable other than firing them.” 

Jason Berger, a partner at Lewis Brisbois, was among those who reached out to Bourne after the post. “He’s right,” Berger says. “Some lawyers abuse that position because of the money that can be made when you’re in such a unique space.”

“This is a problem with lawyers that I’ve observed since I started practicing,” adds Gandhar Savur, founder of Savur Law. “I sometimes don’t get a response from an opposing lawyer for months, and these lawyers somehow flourish professionally while routinely not responding to people or getting transactions closed. It’s something that reflects poorly on our profession as a whole.”

Other attorneys bristled at the critique. “Often, lawyers will be blamed for the shortcomings of incompetent managers,” one attorney says. “Even some managers that are very prominent in the business have no idea what they’re doing” — and they bog down lawyers with requests that should be handled by an accountant or a label, the attorney continues, preventing them from focusing on their actual jobs. 

“Lawyers aren’t just like, ‘We’re gonna cash these checks and screw our clients because we don’t care,’” adds Zach Bohlender, a former music attorney who left the profession to co-found Charta, a company that aims to save lawyers time by distilling the process of drawing up side-artist and producer agreements. “We feel that stress. It’s really tough mentally.” 

The simmering tension between music-industry factions is partially a symptom of a shift in the broader ecosystem. “The blame shouldn’t all fall on [lawyers’] shoulders,” Bourne acknowledges. “Every role has been affected by the oversaturation our market is experiencing.” 

Executives on both sides of the debate agree that there are more artists than ever before, and today’s music lawyers have more to do than their predecessors. “The workload of an artist attorney has definitely increased as music-making has become more collaborative,” says Adam Zia, founding partner of the Zia Firm. “There used to be a few producers for every album; now there might be 20 or 30 different writers and producers.” And a contract has to be drawn up and negotiated for each one of those collaborators. 

“When we started going to five agreements per song, we should have taken them down from 35 pages to three pages,” says Josh Pothier, director of Kingsway Music Library, a collection of original compositions created by the producer Ging (formerly known as Frank Dukes) for sampling purposes. 

“You look through those agreements, and there are still B-side protections that haven’t been necessary since we were pressing 7-inch singles,” Pothier continues. “We had a real opportunity to restructure this business when it went digital. We didn’t take it, and now we’re really struggling.” 

Not only does each contemporary release tend to come laden with more paperwork, there are also simply more releases than there used to be. “Now artists are terrified that if they don’t put out music constantly, people are just going to forget them,” Bohlender explains. 

But many of the managers and lawyers who spoke for this story also pointed out that lawyers are “incentivized” to take on a lot of clients since most of them operate on a 5% commission for the deals they shepherd across the finish line. “We represent developing acts for basically nothing, and there’s a venture component — you represent X number of artists, and hopefully a couple end up making it and they make everything worthwhile from a financial standpoint,” says the attorney who requested anonymity. But this can frustrate managers who see their lawyers single-mindedly chasing “after big money deals and just leaving all the smaller shit to the side,” as Pothier puts it.  

More artists releasing more music with more paperwork, combined with a business model that encourages volume, means that “everybody’s completely jammed,” according to Lucas Keller, founder and president of Milk & Honey. Jammed to the point where attorneys’ response time is almost a joke around the music industry.

“A guy called me the other day and said, ‘I want to sack my lawyer — he takes too long on agreements, two months sometimes,’” Keller recalls. While his friend was annoyed, the Milk & Honey boss thought two months was actually a pretty decent turnaround time relative to some of the lags he’s seen. “The guy sounds great!” he quipped. “We should send him more business!”

Lawyers are hardly the only music industry operators accused of stretching themselves thin — the major labels have been charged with doing the same thing. However, “When a label is over-signing stuff, they’re paying money for it, and the artist is making a judgment call: ‘There’s a very real possibility that I could be shelved or get lost in the sauce,’” says Matt Buser, founder of Buser Legal. In contrast, he notes, “When you sign up with an attorney, you might even be paying the attorney a retainer. The consideration flow is different.” 

And unlike labels, lawyers also have certain duties to their clients, according to Stephen Gillers, who teaches ethics at New York University School of Law. Under the court’s rules of professional conduct, “you can’t take on more clients than you can competently handle,” Gillers says. (He also notes that “you cannot take on a client in a matter if the matter is adverse to another client,” another problem in the music industry.)

What can be done to both help artists who need legal counsel and ease the burden on their lawyers? “We could do a lot better at streamlining a lawyer’s job by making a global template for agreements,” Pothier says. Several managers also believe that artificial intelligence might one day take over some of the time-consuming contract-drafting duties. 

Bohlender is attempting to create his own tech solution with Charta. “How do we create a more efficient way to draft contracts?” he asks. His platform aims to distill producer and side-artist agreements to a few key provisions that can be quickly negotiated and then slotted into standardized contracts. 

But for now, Bohlender notes, solutions are scarce: “No one’s winning.”