All the law's a stage

All the law's a stage

Despite reports of plummeting profits in theatreland, Stephen Ward finds lawyers who tackle contracts and copyright in areas from TV and films to musicals in good spirit

There is one group of niche lawyers who will not need to be among the first customers for the Royal Academy for Dramatic Arts (RADA) training courses in voice projection and communication skills for senior lawyers.

The small number of niche theatre lawyers already identify closely with their clients, and none more so than Simon Meadon, a partner at City firm Tarlo Lyons, which numbers among its clients impresario Cameron Mackintosh, whose shows include 'Miss Saigon' and 'The Phantom of the Opera'.

'When I originally trained as a lawyer, what I really wanted to be was a theatre director,' Mr Meadon says.

'But you know how parents all say "hang on a minute - you need a profession behind you", so I got law behind me first, then found this thing called entertainment law.' But a decade ago, having secured his future in his parents' eyes, he turned his back on the law for a while.

He wrote to every producer in London, and Bill Kenwright - an actor turned producer with several hundred productions to his name - offered him a job.

Mr Meadon spent five years as a producer.

'I had a great time and learned a lot about the industry,' he says.

He worked in London and on Broadway, transferred productions from one to the other, and negotiated with the composer Stephen Sondheim at his home in New York.

But eventually he returned to the law, not least because as he puts it, 'the hours of a theatre producer are as long as, if not even longer than, a commercial City lawyer would put in'.

Other lawyers at the handful of firms which have the specialism of theatre within the wider niche of entertainment, concur that it is not a sector to dabble in.

David Wills, former partner and now a consultant at London firm Campbell Hooper, whose best known client is director Trevor Nunn, says he spends a lot of time watching performances.

His wall used to be covered in flyers for shows he had helped bring to life.

'When you meet people at the sharp end you need to be able to be in touch with what they are doing,' he says.

'It is absolutely vital.

Otherwise, rightly or wrongly, people would be sceptical about taking the advice you are giving.' He says even watching a production by somebody who is not a client may still be useful.

'They might approach me a month later for advice, and if I am familiar with their work, we already have a connection established,' he adds.Mr Meadon, who does theatre, film and television while another partner Michael Rose does exclusively theatre, and whose firm's other clients include the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London, goes to virtually every opening night.

And he says theatre has its own jargon.

'Producers like to be able to talk about percentages of back-end, and for us to know straight away what it means.' (It means the shares of net profit.) But aside from the terminology and culture, there is no theatre law as such which applies solely to the stage.The core of lawyers' work in the theatre, like other entertainment branches of film, television and new media, mainly involves contracts and copyright, as Lawrence Harrison, the founder of niche entertainment firm Harrison Curtis three-and-a-half years ago, explains.

'We're involved in the acquisition of rights, commissioning agreements, play licences, agreements putting together co-producers, touring agreements, agreements with theatres,' he says.

The work is often non-contentious, and there are many standard contracts, but there are exceptions.

Disputes over infringement of rights arise from the most unlikely places.

In one recent case, which was settled in private just ahead of trial on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice, Campbell Hooper represented three beneficiaries of George Bernard Shaw's estate.

The Irish playwright had left the rights to the play 'Pygmalion', and its musical version 'My Fair Lady', jointly to the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and the National Gallery of Ireland, who all claimed that the US media company CBS had not distributed fair shares to them.

Several of the law firms also act in defamation claims.

Mr Meadon says: 'Producers are often victims of salacious stories in tabloid newspapers.' The same applies to high-profile actors.

Perhaps more challenging still - at least to discuss with a straight face - was Mr Meadon's advice last year on the transfer of the 'genital origami' show, 'The Puppetry of the Penis', from its sell-out run at the Edinburgh Festival to the Whitehall Theatre in London.

No firm does solely theatre.

At the Simkins Partnership in London, for example, where clients include Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group and the National Theatre, there are 20 partners.

Four cover property, and the remaining 16 cover various 'sub-niches' within company/commercial, film, television, music and advertising.

'Theatre straddles film, TV and music,' partner David Franks says.But although theatre is not the dominant sector of the creative media for generating volume legal work, it is still an important expertise to have on board.

Mr Harrison says in the 1960s, when several London media law firms started up, including Harbottle & Lewis, Simkins (where he worked) and Sheridans, 'all had a theatre practice, and partly it was because the people who founded those firms felt that live performance work was important in providing a broad degree of legal expertise.' He, like Mr Franks, combines theatre with expertise in live music.

The number of stage musicals makes this one of the most obvious overlaps in an industry where there are many cross-overs.

Mr Harrison illustrates the principle with one of his clients, the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which has just had a video and television production made of a stage show.

'We were able to do that because we do film and television work, so they didn't have to go elsewhere.'Theatre clients are on the whole loyal, partly because in a creative field, with personalities involved and individual preferences important, there is a disinclination to change solicitor lightly.

'They (clients) tend to get a rapport with the person they deal with the first time,' Mr Meadon explains.

'They tend to say that they know him or her, and he or she knows them and their business.

They will say things like "do it the way we did in the last show, only change clause 16".' The high-risk nature of theatrical financing means that a degree of trust built over the years is an asset.

Mr Meadon says: 'In the UK, producers are notoriously scraping around to get a deal together, and they don't have a lot of money at the beginning of the process to pay lawyers and accountants.

You therefore try to advise them as cheaply as you can in the hope that they hit the jackpot and will be back with their other hits.

The lawyer doesn't share the risk in the sense of investing in the show, but there is a trust and an understanding.' Mr Wills at Campbell Hooper explains that except in a few cases, money for a production is raised from outside funders, known in the trade as 'angels', who want to be able to see exactly what they will get in return for the 2,500 to 50,000 they invest.

He says: 'They will want to know details such as how soon the cost will be paid, and at what stage in a run the production goes into profit.

It used to be done on the back of an envelope, but not any more.

It is regulated by the Financial Services Authority now.' Each production now has to issue a document similar to a prospectus for a new company on the Stock Exchange, and this document has to be certified by a lawyer or accountant.Mr Wills stresses the speculative nature of all theatre productions.

'If I could guess which were going to be hits, I wouldn't be sitting behind this desk, I'd be making money backing them,' he says.Work is seasonal.

Few producers mount a new show in London's West End in summer, because according to Mr Meadon, 'people want to go outside to open-air concerts and so on, not in a hot theatre.

The best time to launch is mid-September'.

Although the London theatre has its economic ups and downs, caused by unpredictable short-term factors - such as a dearth of US tourists, scared off by foot and mouth disease - in the long term, solicitors are bullish.

Mr Franks at the Simkins Partnership says more Broadway productions are transferring to the West End, when it used to be one-way traffic from the UK to the US.

And Mr Harrison says there has been a growth in transfers of productions from the subsidised sector to the commercial theatres.

Mr Harrison's firm has taken on two extra partners since it started, although he says: 'It didn't double the number of partners on the strength of the theatre work.' But he still predicts other growth areas such as theatre workshops being used to make training courses for commercial companies more creative.

He foresees productions being broadcast pay-per-view on the Internet.

The Simkins Partnership has already acted for the producers of an Internet soap opera, called 'Caroline Online'.Meanwhile, Mr Meadon is on a promise from his managing partner that his firm will let him go back to producing if the right project turns up.

And for the time being, he, like the other theatre lawyers, is happy in the field he has found.

Mr Meadon says: 'I like the creative process, the creative team, I love all that.

It makes it exciting for me, even though I'm in the office.

I'm doing contracts for something I'm interested in.'Stephen Ward is a freelance journalist