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Q: Becoming an entertainment lawyer

I am a second year law degree student who would like to use my degree somehow in the entertainment field. How do I achieve this?

A: Setting out from scratch to become an entertainment lawyer is an exceptionally difficult objective to achieve and one which requires a large amount of luck and being in the right place at the right time, since competition is fierce and vacancies are few and far between. There are many newly qualified lawyers and law students who see it as the most interesting area of specialisation.

To be successful at it, you will need an in-depth knowledge of copyright law and a good working knowledge of contract, company and commercial law. You will also need a good working knowledge of the industry, by which I mean both the way it functions (its terminology, customs and practice) and the people in it. How best to acquire this knowledge is problematic. Some, but certainly not all of it can be acquired through books and industry press.

On the practical side you either need to have worked in the business or to have spent years listening to people involved in it, advising on its legal aspects, and familiarising yourself with its contract structures and protocols. The latter course involves some kind of job placement in a specialist legal department of your chosen field, which is difficult to achieve.

My feeling is that your best route would be, either to look for a job with an in-house legal department of a major corporation in the entertainment field (for example, Sony, EMI, Warner, Disney etc) or to seek a job in the company and commercial department of a firm of solicitors which also has an entertainment law unit, and hope that, by talking to and perhaps making yourself useful to the latter, you may gradually be able to acquire the knowledge and move sideways into it. At least you will be well placed for a sideways move if a vacancy suddenly occurs. You can, of course, take the conventional route of registering your preferred interest with recruitment agencies or writing cold to specialist law firms whose names are obtainable from the major legal directories (The Legal 500 and Chambers), but it can be a soul-destroying business and you must prepare yourself for the likelihood of continual disappointment.

Certainly in my own case, and I suspect most others, I drifted into it by accident, and by having the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time. Even then it was a gradual process of increasing specialisation over a period of years, so that while it was building up there was always something else to fall back on when the theatre work was insufficient to keep me fully occupied.

There are a number of sub-divisions of an entertainment lawyer's work and, although these overlap to some extent, it is best if you decide to concentrate on one of them for job application purposes. They are (i) theatre, (ii) film and TV and (iii) music. Other more esoteric areas, such as publishing and radio broadcasting, tend to be offshoots of one or more of the three principal divisions. Spanning all of them and likely to become increasingly important with the passage of time is information technology, or multi-media as it is sometimes called. You should try to make sure that, wherever you go, you will have ready access to specialist lawyers in IT, whether integrated with the entertainment law department or not.

Theatre law is a very small catchment area and there are very few lawyers who are focused exclusively on it. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which are economic or related to the structure of the industry itself, and some of which stem from the fact that there are standard printed forms available for much of the work which would otherwise require a lawyer's attention, in consequence of collective bargaining agreements between unions and producing managements. You have a better chance with music or film/TV than with theatre, although the opportunities are limited in these areas as well.

Furthermore, becoming a successful entertainment lawyer requires a particular aptitude which in some respects is different from that required for other areas of legal practice. I know some very good commercial lawyers who have tried their hand at entertainment law practice, but quickly discovered that their superior drafting skills and technical knowledge were not enough for what was required of them, which includes some degree of flair, imagination and instinctive judgement, based on a knowledge of the industry. There is no way of telling in advance whether you have the aptitude. That is why I think the indirect route of a commercial lawyer aiming to move sideways, but with the ability to stay put if it doesn't work out, is probably the best, but who knows - you may get lucky with a direct approach if there happens to be a vacancy and if you are able to make the right impression. However, you will still need the basic foundation mentioned above, which requires patience, determination and hard work.

First published September 2000