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[This article was first posted to DVDPundit on October 7, 2003. I re-post it here to give a bit of background about yours truly, the LawPundit blogger, and the law firm with which he was affiliated. We add here, anno 2020, a link to the detailed history of the firm at its online website at https://www.paulweiss.com/about-the-firm/history]
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison [known in the trade as Paul Weiss, often written as Paul|Weiss] is an acclaimed international law firm headquartered in New York City. The LawPundit joined Paul|Weiss as a summer associate in 1970 and then in 1971 as a full associate after graduating from Stanford Law School.
[Note anno 2020: The LawPundit had numerous other law firm offers way back then, but regarded Paul|Weiss to be the best law firm in America, and that opinion has not changed over the last 50 years. Indeed, American Lawyer in 2019 selected Paul|Weiss as “Law Firm of the Year”. Paul|Weiss has an exceptionally strong practice mixture of corporate, information technology and entertainment law and excels in litigation and M&A (mergers and acquisitions). At the firm’s history page online, Paul|Weiss writes:
“In his posthumously published autobiography, one of its most storied partners, Arthur L. Liman, knowledgably wrote that “[e]very economical and social upheaval in the country has found its way into our office.”
The firm’s clients have included the largest financial institutions in the world, and the earth’s neediest citizens. In between are names, by way of tiny sample, such as Spiro T. Agnew, Julie Andrews, Kofi Annan, Brooke Astor, the Berrigan Brothers, Andy Capp, Hugh L. Carey, Lucia Chase, Joan Ganz Clooney, William Sloan Coffin, Willem de Kooning, William O. Douglas, Pierre DuPont, Leo Durocher, Philo Farnsworth, Federico Fellini, Marshall Field III, Curt Flood, Jane Fonda, Henry Ford, Jr., Otto Frank, Anna Freud, Hugh Hefner, Leona Helmsley, Don Henley, Anita F. Hill, Langston Hughes, Hubert H. Humphrey, Steve Jobs, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Robert F. Kennedy, Calvin Klein, John Lennon, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Nelson Mandela, Thurgood Marshall, John McEnroe, Golda Meir, Marilyn Monroe, Vladimir Nabokov, Joe Namath, Paul Newman, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, William S. Paley, Joseph Papp, I.M. Pei, Cole Porter, Charles Revson, David Rockefeller, Steve Ross, Mark Rothko, Anwar Sadat, Dorothy Schiff, Frank Serra, Paul Simon, Stephen Sondheim, Eliot Spitzer, Jessica Tandy, Donatella Versace, Robert Vesco, Andy Warhol, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jock Whitney and August Wilson.”
Some years after I left the firm, Paul Weiss played an important advisory legal role in the development of the DVD standard (Digital Versatile Disc) which we use today.
This was not the only activity of the law firm in the newly developing field of digital information technology.
Indeed, Paul Weiss represented the National Music Publishers Association [a client for whom I did quite a bit of work as associate in my years with the firm] and it was the NMPA with whom Napster settled in the famous Napster copyright infringement action several years ago. Paul Weiss and the NMPA are still very much in the news currently.
Similarly, in a recent peer-to-peer file sharing copyright infringement case, Paul Weiss represents the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in a suit involving Grokster and Kazaa.
Paul Weiss has also represented the EMI Group and EMI Music.
Moreover, Paul Weiss had a long-standing relationship to AOL Time Warner, the largest communications company in the world, formed through decades in part by the efforts of Paul Weiss lawyers, such as Peter Robert Haje (“Pete”), who became Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Time Warner and thereafter Counsellor to AOL Time Warner. [Note Anno 2020: Peter Haje was a good friend and mentor of mine for many years and passed away in 2017. At the firm Peter was the Chairman of the Committee on Committees and, together with Richard H. Paul (“Dick”), son of law firm founder Randolph E. Paul, headed law firm recruiting, which in 1970/1971 included yours truly. Dick passed away in 1979. God bless the memory of these personally exceptional and professionally gifted men who thought me worthy of joining their illustrious ranks.]
Essentially, the law firm helped to make the music, movie and entertainment industry what it is today.
Politically, Paul Weiss has always been known to be among the most “liberal” of all the so-called major US law firms. The ranks of Paul Weiss law firm partners included Adlai Ewing Stevenson, Lloyd Kirkham Garrison, Ramsey Clark, Morris B. Abram, Arthur Goldberg, Edward N. Costikyan, Theodore Sorensen (today, of counsel to the firm), and Judge Simon H. Rifkind, lawyer inter alia to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Charles H. Revson of Revlon, and the last “patriarch” of the firm. It is consequently a remarkable situation that the firm Paul Weiss now is seen as representing the copyright-protected “establishment” recording industry. How did this paradox situation come to be?
To get an answer to this question, we must look at a “Paul Weiss centered” history of the entertainment business, broadly defined, in the past 100 years.
The beginnings of the firm were tied to Paul Weiss clients who developed television in its infancy. Additionally, founder John Franklin Wharton was the lawyer and executor for songwriter Cole Porter, who wrote the music for Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, the first “talking” motion picture. The connection to cinema thus came early — and subsequent exercisable expertise in a profession is of course largely a question of experience. So the firm got in on the ground floor of the entertainment business many years ago.
Logically, Paul Weiss then became attorneys for famous artists and fashion designers such as Andy Warhol and Calvin Klein, while other partners of the firm such as Robert H. Montgomery served as counsel to movie stars like Marilyn Monroe.
The emphasis on new technology, glamour, entertainment and politics thus has a long law firm tradition at Paul Weiss. This flair was also combined with a foresight toward coming societal developments.
For example, Paul Weiss was the first major law firm in New York City to move out of crowded Wall Street into Midtown Manhattan, signalling a move followed by many other major New York City law firms.
Paul Weiss was also the first major law firm to hire a black lawyer – William Thaddeus Coleman Jr. – who finished first in his class at Harvard Law School in 1946 and who commuted to Paul Weiss in New York City from Philadelphia, his home town, because no major law firm in Philadelphia would hire him. For the full story see William Coleman, Jr.
All commentators have pointed out that Paul Weiss is “different” than all other big law firms, but defining that difference has not been easy.
Perhaps the core of the difference was reflected in Judge Rifkind’s repeated policy statement that “a law firm is a profession and not a business organization,”
quoted by Michael Orey, in Paul, Weiss: Profits and Principle, The American Lawyer, June, 1987. I certainly agreed with that statement when I joined the firm.
In any case, it is no suprise that Paul Weiss was actively involved in developing the DVD standard – this involvement was the continuation of a tradition that has been going on at Paul, Weiss for many decades. It is not by chance that Paul Weiss represents the music and entertainment industry TODAY – it helped to make that industry what it is YESTERDAY. But of course, times change and industries change, and we are in a period of digital transformation.
Hence, the scope of coverage of DVDPundit reaches beyond simple news and reviews of music, movies, information or software found on Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs). DVDPundit’s ambit also spans the legal and political IT world, including copyright and piracy issues, hardware and software standards, and the entire world of DVD.