Page 18 - Los Angeles Vol 5 No 2
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 is reintroduction to entertain- ment law served as a catalyst for a burgeoning practice.  e  rm repre- sented institutional clients—all the major studios and major television networks, as well as  nance compa- nies and independent production companies—for both litigation and transactional work.  e entertain- ment business became a “good chunk” of the  rm’s work.
“We made a strategic decision to take only institutional clients, and not
the talent side,” Meisinger says of the  rm, which eventually grew to about 150 attorneys. “We carved out a niche for ourselves and grew it into quite a large business.”
But every good story has an ending, and for Meisinger and his  rm, that came in 1998, when  e Walt Disney Co. invited him to become executive vice president and general counsel.
“It was truly one of the premium general counsel positions in the coun- try,” he said. “Excluding insurance
It’s di cult, but it’s incredibly rewarding work.”
companies, Disney was one of the top 15 largest law departments in the country, and it had lawyers lo- cated throughout the world. It was an extraordinary job.
“One of the things most inter- esting about the job was that in ad- dition to the international scope, I also had the opportunity to testify before regulators, including the European Union Antitrust Com- mission and the Congressional
Committee on antitrust and intellec- tual property issues,” he says. “ at’s something that a normal legal career doesn’t typically encompass, and that’s why I was so drawn to it.”
He testi ed about copyright and antitrust issues, including the EU’s ex- amination of a proposed merger be- tween two companies that competed with Disney. Meisinger and his team weighed in against the merger, which was eventually not approved.
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