Lessons from our clients: what can legal learn from the creative sector?

Mary Collier is a commercial contracts, intellectual property lawyer at specialist sports, media and entertainment firm Jayes Collier, part of the Excello Law Group. These are her lessons from clients.

Entertainment is one of Britain’s most dynamic and fast-moving sectors. In my experience, primarily working with the music, film and TV industries, clients face assorted challenges, not least the revolutionary changes brought about through digital technology platforms. Although these have dramatically increased access to the market for creative people, monetising the associated rights often remains problematic.

The legal profession has been similarly impacted by technology. On the one hand, this has allowed many routine documentary processes to be simplified and completed much more quickly through the use of artificial intelligence and other new technologies. But on the other, this is driving down fee rates and making some law firms uncompetitive, and even unprofitable. All of our clients are understandably sensitive both to costs and to fee rates.

For the most part, lawyer-client portals are generally of little or no interest to people in the creative sectors. And pure legal advice is just one element of what our clients want – they also need empathy and patience to help develop their interest and understanding throughout the necessary legal processes.

Because it’s such a specialist area of law, gaining clients’ trust is essential because they invariably end up depending on you in the decision-making process on their behalf. Building, developing and managing those client relationships is therefore essential. Happy clients feel like they are really being looked after: that is the most important thing.

The art of legal

The legal concerns of our clients are many and varied – from contracts and agreements, through to IP and tax issues. But rights ownership stands above everything else. Even if it does not make very much difference in practical financial terms, clients tend to see owning rights at the holy grail. Regrettably, by the time they see a lawyer, a whole body of work may already be in the public domain without any of their rights being protected.

Too many young, talented artists, just starting out, are commercially exploited before they become experienced enough to understand their rights properly. Quite often, companies in the more dominant position will exploit the fact they might be scared to push back. Our role includes making clients alert to the fact that what they are creating has value or, perhaps more importantly, potential value, and that they should protect it.

Typically, clients approach us without any previous experience of dealing with lawyers. The advice they need usually encompasses a much broader range of issues than just enforcing rights or agreeing the terms of a contract. As a result, you can end up looking after all their legal and business affairs far beyond the subject of the initial enquiry.

In this way, you develop a relationship with them built on trust. To underpin this, good communication skills are paramount. Beyond being flexible with clients because they want you to do other types of work for them, being inquisitive and interested in all aspects of their life really matters. You need to being aware of the difficulties and issues that they have to face.

Ultimately, client interaction is the best part, for me, of being a solicitor in this sector: following their career through and seeing things transform for them is really rewarding. It’s very satisfying to be part of something, and you genuinely feel that you are helping people.