The Best In-House Entertainment Attorneys of 2023: Disney, Netflix, More
The 20 individuals profiled below are some of the most influential unsung heroes in entertainment. While they work mostly behind the scenes, the fruits of their labors have an immeasurable impact on the fortunes of their companies and often set precedents and examples for others.
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From negotiating deals with talent, to forging partnerships with other enterprises, to strategizing with top management on potential M&A moves, to exercising vigilance over legal threats, in-house attorneys and business affairs executives can be the grown-ups in the room, carefully guiding their companies to success. When not interacting with the outside world and coordinating with outside law firms, they play an important role in setting internal policy in areas ranging from best practices to diversity and inclusion initiatives.
This year, naturally, many wanted to comment on artificial intelligence, considering it both a threat and an opportunity. Jeffrey Harleston, general counsel and exec VP, business and legal affairs, for Universal Music Group, even traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property and called for actions to protect creator rights. “AI in the service of artists and creativity is a wonderful thing,” Harleston told the senators. “But AI that… appropriates their work… image, likeness or voice is not.”
In putting this list together, one key fact stood out: Over the past few years, a large number of women and people of color have reached the highest ranks of the industry’s legal and business affairs community. Despite some recent highly visible setbacks, this bolsters the belief that entertainment offers higher-than-average opportunities for corporate mobility. Whatever the cause, there’s reason for hope that a fully level playing field will ultimately emerge.
For editorial questions, please contact Peter Caranicas at peter.caranicas@variety.com and Sharareh Drury at sdrury@variety.com
Grace Del Val
General counsel, head of business affairs
Bad Robot
Del Val has powered deals for Bad Robot, the company led by J.J. Abrams and Katie McGrath. She shepherded expansion into animation projects like Oscar-winner “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse”; growth in documentaries via deals with Oscar-winner Glen Zipper, leading to “The Blue Angels” for Imax and Amazon and “The Yankees Win” for ESPN; launching Bad Robot Live to stage productions for Broadway and London’s West End; a capital raise for Bad Robot Games; start of a podcast unit with Spotify; and a partnership with Mattel Films and Warner Bros. to produce a Hot Wheels film. Del Val, a U. of Chicago Law School grad, believes success depends on building trust internally because it “ensures your counsel is valued and respected, even when it’s difficult to hear.”
Mark DeVitre
Exec VP and general counsel
Allen Media Group
When DeVitre joined a little-known outfit run by entrepreneurial dynamo Byron Allen in 2012, AMG had a staff of 100. Today he oversees a team of 10 in-house attorneys and multiple outside law firms at a 2,400-employee company that sprawls across a wide array of media assets, including Grio Television Network (formerly Black News Channel), 27 network-affiliated TV stations, 12 TV networks (including The Weather Channel) and multiple streaming platforms. DeVitre and team also manage AMG’s film and TV production units, which produce 73 programs distributed globally. The Southwestern Law School grad likes to deploy AI: “If I have a contract I like, AI can help me revise or update it quickly, and if my company owns creative material, it can do the same in that realm; so expect to see lots of exploration and action there.”
Matthew Erramouspe
Chief legal officer and exec VP
Legendary
Never an idle moment for Erramouspe. He recently led the negotiation and consummation of numerous strategic transactions for Legendary, including the company’s $800 million, five-year credit facility from J.P. Morgan, its multiyear worldwide global theatrical film distribution partnership with Sony Pictures, and its $760 million equity investment from Apollo. He has overseen production, financing and distribution arrangements for “Dune” and its sequel, the Monsterverse franchise that features Godzilla and Kong, and the upcoming “Minecraft.” What lies ahead? “M&A activity in the current market has been relatively modest because buyers and sellers generally remain too far apart on valuations,” says the UCLA School of Law grad. “I think the next six months will see buyers and sellers close the gap, paving the way for greater activity.”
Lesley Freeman
VP, Legal
MGM Studios
A whirlwind of activity has been blowing through Amazon-owned MGM of late, and Freeman has been at its center. She spearheaded MGM’s full acquisition of premium pay TV network MGM+, formerly known as Epix; the closing of MGM corporate credit facilities totaling $2.6 billion; the expansion of MGM’s television division with the acquisitions of Evolution Media and Big Fish Entertainment; the relaunch of Orion Pictures; and MGM’s return to U.S. theatrical distribution through United Artists Releasing. The UCLA School of Law grad believes that the role of in-house attorneys and business affairs execs will continue to expand because companies rely on them more than ever “to help their clients navigate through this ever-changing media landscape, taking into account technological advances, business model shifts, M&A and enhanced regulatory scrutiny … They’re essential business partners to their clients.”
Amalia Goldvaser
General counsel and chief compliance officer
Content Partners
Goldvaser cuts through the clutter of the notoriously complex world of entertainment finance. She steers Content Partners — which specializes in acquiring backend profit participations — through acquisitions of films, TV programming and related royalty interests and IP rights. Recently, she led a legally thorny acquisition of a slate of five films that earned more than $500 million in box office revenue; and helped CP acquire a majority interest in a company that owns four films representing more than $2 billion in box office revenue. Additionally, she oversaw the purchase of FilmDistrict’s library, worth more than $600 million in box office revenue, and handled legal matters for CP subsidiary Revolution Studios. A graduate of the Cardozo School of Law, Goldvaser leans into today’s business trends: “With higher financing costs, we expect companies to look at more creative capital raising opportunities, and monetizing content will be one of them.”
Horacio Gutierrez
Senior executive VP, general counsel and chief compliance officer
The Walt Disney Co.
Since he joined Disney 18 months ago, Gutierrez has helped the company navigate through the stormy waters of change and transformation in entertainment. He oversees a team of attorneys responsible for the company’s legal affairs around the world while also managing its government relations work and acting as advisor to leadership and the board of directors as Disney celebrates its 100th anniversary. The highly qualified Gutierrez (he holds degrees from Harvard Law School and the U. of Miami School of Law) boasts insight that comes from spending much of his career “as both disrupter and disrupted,” and deploying that experience “to remove roadblocks for our creative teams so that they can unleash their genius on the big screen, the small screen, parks and wherever Disney reaches consumers.”
Jeffrey Harleston
General counsel and exec VP, business and legal affairs
Universal Music Group
In 2021, Harleston, who just celebrated 30 years at UMG, helped steer the company though one of the most successful media IPOs and the largest music listing in history, which valued the company at $53 billion. . He’s keenly interested in the potential and pitfalls of AI and in July testified before the U.S. Senate subcommittee on intellectual property, calling for a federal right of publicity, among other actions, to protect creator rights. “AI in the service of artists and creativity is a wonderful thing,” Harleston told the senators. “But AI that uses, or worse yet, appropriates, their work — or their name, image, likeness or voice — without authorization, is not.” The UC Berkeley School of Law grad also serves as co-chair of UMG’s task force for meaningful change, which focuses on inclusion and social justice.
Kimberley D. Harris
Exec VP, Comcast
General counsel, NBCUniversal
Harris, who reports both to Comcast president Mike Cavanagh and chairman-CEO Brian Roberts, oversees and helps organize the sprawling company’s legal function and international/ regulatory affairs. This past year she launched NBCU BRIEF (Building Relationships in Epic Form), a program that paired 16 law firm attorneys with NBCU attorney advisors for three months of learning events with NBCU business and legal leaders, providing them with an inside look at the company. From 2017 to 2022, Harris led the Women’s Network, NBCU’s employee resource group that advances successful women throughout the company. The Yale Law School grad firmly believes in keeping up with the shifts rocking the business: “Precedent and past practices aren’t going to work when business models and technology are changing so rapidly. In-house lawyers need to keep pace with the change.”
Angela Jones
Senior director, business and legal affairs, original series
Netflix
From her key perch at the streamer, Jones manages some of Netflix’s biggest studio relationships — including those with Warner Bros, Universal and Sony — for the U.S. series team, as well as overseeing dealmaking for some of Netflix’s highest-profile scripted series, including “Wednesday,” “Emily in Paris,” “Cobra Kai,” “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “The Night Agent” and “Beef.” Additionally, she was responsible for negotiating Netflix’s recent pickup of limited series “Ripley,” based on Patricia Highsmith’s novels. Jones, a graduate of the College of William & Mary Marshall Wythe School of Law, sees her role as that of a “creative problem solver” — both with internal execs and “those on the other side of the table. That role doesn’t change as the business evolves; we just become a bigger voice in the discussion.”
Palisa Kelley
Head of legal and business affairs
HarbourView Equity Partners
Kelley works the world of entertainment finance on a large scale — handling more than $1 billion in backing from Apollo and negotiating deals across music, film and TV. Recent high-profile transactions include ac- quiring the catalogs of Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, Nelly, Incubus, Florida Georgia Line, Wiz Khalifa, Dre & Vidal and Luis Fonsi, among others. She also structured multimillion-dollar agreements with artists such as pop star Pitbull, rapper A$AP Rocky and Guatemalan singer Ricardo Arjona. Prior to HarbourView, she worked at top law firms and companies, including Selverne Kelley Bradford, Sony Music, Weinrib Rudell & Vassallo and Paul Weiss. The U. of Pennsylvania Carey Law School grad defines her main mission as assisting HarbourView “as it navigates the intricacies of the entertainment landscape and craft workable business solutions in a rapidly changing regulatory environment.”
Clara Kim
Exec VP, chief legal and business affairs officer
ASCAP
Kim helped drive ASCAP’s historic 2022 revenue of $1.52 billion, which put $1.38 billion in distributions in the pockets of the org’s songwriter, composer and publisher members; and negotiated deals with streaming, broadcast and audiovisual licensees — including Apple TV+, Disney+, Max, Meta, Amazon, ABC and YouTube — that are yielding higher rates and increased royalties. She also completed membership renewal agreements with high-profile members like Olivia Rodrigo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Cardi B, Justin Bieber and 50 Cent. An NYU School of Law grad, Kim wants to keep AI under control: “We need to ensure that tech companies don’t get a free pass to use creators’ musical compositions for which they haven’t obtained proper rights. Simply because AI requires large amounts of content to be trained does not mean that AI developers should be allowed to take and use the content without permission and for free.”
Stephanie Kyoko McKinnon
General counsel
Skydance Media
What value can you place on the work of in-house counsel? If you’re at Skydance, that number is pretty high. McKinnon recently negotiated Skydance’s new credit facility with J.P. Morgan, worth $1 billion, which replaced the studio’s $500 million revolving credit line. She also engineered Skydance’s $400 million strategic investment round led by KKR and joined by the Ellison family, Redbird and Tencent, pushing the studio’s valuation above a whopping $4 billion. Recent content deals include an investment in country music star Tim McGraw’s media venture Down Home, a massive joint venture with the NFL and a partnership with Lucasfilm Games. As Skydance continues to grow, the role of in-house counsel is “increasingly strategic,” says the McGill Faculty of Law grad, “not only in the way we approach a deal, but in the dealmaking we pursue.”
Jessica Nickelsberg
General counsel-operations
Neon
It takes people like Nickelsberg to help guide indies to success. She joined Neon soon after it was founded in 2017 and since then has steadily grown its business and legal affairs function. During that journey, she has overseen the dealmaking behind every Neon film acquisition, from “I, Tonya” on, including this year’s best picture nominee “Triangle of Sadness.” She also negotiated Neon’s distribution deals, including its Pay 1 output deal with Hulu. This past year, Nickelsberg led talks on Neon’s second credit facility, with Comerica Bank. The Northwestern Pritzker School of Law grad says her role gives her a unique perspective, noting that, as in-house attorney, you operate from a vantage point that allows you to see all facets of “your company and its plans for evolution and growth. It
makes you uniquely positioned to give strategic guidance.”
Paul M. Robinson
Exec VP and general counsel
Warner Music Group
It has been a busy year for Robinson across several sectors, including business affairs, litigation, digital legal, employment, M&A, financing, corporate governance and public policy. He and his team have been key in providing legal support to the company’s new CEO, Robert Kyncl, and his leadership team. In the swirl of ever-shifting challenges, one important initiative has emerged of late: the provision of legal, business affairs and public policy counsel in crafting the company’s proactive and defensive AI strategy. Indeed, in-house attorneys play a critical role “in all the company’s revenue-generating activities,” says Robinson, a graduate of Fordham University School of Law. “We operate in a highly competitive environment … To steer the company in the right direction, our attorneys, no matter what their roles, need to be business-minded problem solvers.”
Thomas Russell III
Corporate counsel
Amazon Music
Russell advises on deals and spearheads collaborations. Recently, he led artist and music label negotiations for livestream concert series “Amazon Music Live,” airing on Twitch and Prime Video following “Thursday Night Football,” with performances by Megan Thee Stallion, Kane Brown and Lil Wayne; and the NBA Con event where Amazon Music curated three days of live music in collaboration with the NBA, hosted by 2Chainz. For Russell, a graduate of Howard U. School of Law, enthusiasm is a key to success: “Counsel should have a passion for the work of the company. Music is a form of joy that can be used to promote social change and unite communities. By bringing passion and authenticity to the role, in-house counsel is in a better position to collaborate with business teams to provide an amazing customer experience.”
Ned Sherman
Chief business affairs and legal officer
Skybound Entertainment
Does Sherman have the magic touch? Since he joined the multiplatform entertainment company in May 2022, he has led an increase in development deals and investments, and spearheaded M&A activities and global expansion. During that time Skybound’s valuation more than doubled. Working with IP such as “The Walking Dead” and “Invincible,” the legal team manages strategic partnerships, including a first-look TV deal with Amazon Studios and a first-look movie deal with Universal. Internationally, he oversaw the launch of Skybound Japan, with an eye toward Asia’s lucrative markets, and the acquisition of Icelandic studio Sagafilm. “We must be business-savvy advisors,” says the U. of Texas School of Law grad. “Being able to identify a bad deal is an often overlooked skill. Sometimes the best decision is to cut your losses and move on.”
Savalle Sims
Exec VP and general counsel
Warner Bros. Discovery
From her roost at the pinnacle of WBD, Sims provides strategy and counsel to corporate leaders, including president and CEO David Zaslav. With 20 offices worldwide reporting to her, she helps steer the company at a time of unprecedented guild negotiations and strikes, also navigating the intricacies surrounding product launches such as the new Max combined streamer offering. But Sims also finds time to support the cause of equity and inclusion within the organization and offers mentorship to young professionals navigating the ever-changing job market. A graduate of Notre Dame Law School, Sims believes that “in-house attorneys must continue to deliver legal advice in a practical and digestible manner, devoting more time to understanding the industry and the nuances of the challenges that their companies face.”
Shelly Sroloff
Head of motion picture business affairs
CAA
Sroloff walks with the A-listers. His recent negotiations include a deal for a theatrical and streaming release at Apple Studios on behalf of Jerry Bruckheimer, Joe Kosinski, Plan B Entertainment and Brad Pitt for a Formula One project; with Apple Studios for a Jon Watts film for Watts to write and direct, and George Clooney and Pitt to star in and produce; a first-look deal with Amazon Studios on behalf of Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment; and a Netflix deal with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners. Sroloff also advised on a deal for Mediawan to acquire a stake in Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. The UCLA School of Law grad believes it’s “a constant challenge for both the clients’ representatives and the buyers to understand the value of our clients so that they can be properly compensated.”
Julie Swidler
Exec VP of business affairs and general counsel
Sony Music Entertainment
One of Swidler’s missions is to provide support for the company’s artists. To that end, Sony’s Artists Forward program reaches out to creators via three initiatives: artists and songwriters assistance, which provides career resources for Sony’s entire talent roster; legacy unrecouped balances, which pays artists signed before 2000 through qualifying earnings without regard to their recoupment status; and real-time artists tools, which offers participants greater financial flexibility. To date, Sony Music Group participants have withdrawn nearly $90 million using these features rather than wait for scheduled payment distributions and advances. “We need to be ahead of the curve in order to properly advise our clients regardless of where the business takes us, and to understand when we don’t understand and get outside help,” says Swidler, a graduate of Cardozo School of Law. “That’s what makes our jobs so interesting.”
Bruce Tobey
Exec VP and general counsel
Lionsgate
Corporate transactions are front and center for Tobey. He and his team are shepherding the company’s preparation for the separation of the Lionsgate studio and Starz into two independent, publicly traded companies while advising Lionsgate leadership on current and new business opportunities. He also helped lead the team that negotiated Lionsgate’s agreement with Hasbro to acquire the global eOne entertainment platform. Internally, Tobey, a UCLA Law School grad, created a task force evaluating the opportunities and challenges posed by AI, which he considers a “job enhancer rather than a job replacer. If properly implemented, AI can contribute to enhanced performance and operating efficiencies companywide and can allow our employees to spend more of their time on matters that truly require their unique knowledge, skills and experience.”
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