1. Leadership Portfolio: Barry Oliver Chase Advanced Entertainment Law Entertainment Business Master of Science Paul Siewe August 27, 2009 After doing research for potential legal counsel for my business plan development company, I came across one that seemed to have the necessary education and skills in the entertainment industry to assist me with my business. His name is Barry Oliver Chase. I contacted Mr. Chase and after speaking to him for a little bit, he agreed to give me a phone interview, which was scheduled a week later after our initial encounter. Throughout the length of this paper, I’m going to talk about my interview with Mr. Chase, give you a brief biography on Mr. Chase, a description of his practice and experience in the entertainment industry, and some of the advice he gave me for my business. Mr. Chase is an honors graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School. While at Yale, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the leading national collegiate Honor Society, and was listed as a Ranking Scholar during the majority of his eight semesters before graduating magna cum laude. At Harvard, Mr. Chase graduated with honors, earning his JD degree cum laude at the age of 24. He was a classmate with the author Don Passman at Harvard. Law school as Mr. Chase mentioned it, was a default decision because at the time he didn’t really know what he wanted to do and thought that he would maintain the greatest number of options by going to law school, because as he stated “you don’t restrict yourself with a law degree.” In law school he thought a lot about being an entertainment lawyer but said at the time it didn’t appeal to him so much because he felt like it was going to be all about contracts, and contracts didn’t excite him at the time. But the other side of the Entertainment law that was more interesting to him was Intellectual Property, but entertainment law still wasn’t a big interest to him because at the time he didn’t realize the impact of Intellectual Property, which as he mentioned has exploded tremendously with the increase of knowledge and the Internet, and has become more valuable. After law school he went to a large and well established law firm located in Washington Dc in the early 1970’s and it is then that he realized that he had interest in law that related to freedom of expression, and that tended to appeal to his political and social sense. So during the five years he was at that firm he tried to involve himself in case that dealt with those kinds of issues as much as possible. During that time he got involve with some very exciting first amendment cases, some of which came under fire during the famous Watergate litigation, he felt that those cases were very glamorous and exciting cases for the young lawyer he was at the time. In 1976, after working at the law firm for about 6 years, he went to work with PBS as an associate general counsel, and after working there for two years, he was enticed to become Director of PBS's News and Public Affairs Programming, which started him on a career course that resulted in his becoming the top national PBS programming executive (Vice President for Programming), which he ended up doing for 12 years, so during that time he didn’t do any legal work. In 1991 he moved down to Florida and work as the senior vice president for National Production at the PBS station in Miami. In 1996, after leaving the world of television and film production, Mr. Chase returned to the practice of law in Miami, he obtained his second license from the state of Florida (first one was from Washington DC) and went on to open his own practice partly because he wanted to be able to make his own decisions, and also because he couldn’t not find a level of professionalism that he admired amongst other lawyers in Miami. Because of the nature of the entertainment industry Mr. Chase has a vast field of practice from communications and media law to advertising, FCC, Internet, print media, radio, telecommunications, television and film, entertainment, sports and leisure law, art, Intellectual Property law, copyrights, trade dress, trade secrets, trademarks, and computer law but most of the cases he spend hours on are related to music, working on copyright cases, some trademark cases, and Intellectual Property cases. He also represents a lot of writers, television show producers, and a lot of Internet companies, some of which are not always entertainment related. As far as favorite/shining moment, he doesn’t really have any moment per say but always feel proud of himself and satisfied any time that he deals with a case that is difficult, or get a good outcome from a case that an ordinary lawyer could not do. He has his moments he feels good about, few moment he doesn’t feel so good about because as he stated “you can’t be a winner all the time.” Working with music artists, he feels like most of them are cheated and he hates to see the dishonesty they have to put up with; and the necessity for them to always go running to a lawyer, sometime to court to get what is their legal rights. Some of the times he feels the best is when he has to intimidate the other side into giving artists what they deserve. Some of the advices he gave me for my business are: to try to be very artist oriented, to build a reputation as a place artists can trust not to take advantage of them, because a lot of upcoming artist get “screwed” by their producers who either don’t know what they are doing, or cheat them, or both, to charge a fair amount, and to position myself as the artist friendly studio wherever it’s going to be based. After talking to Mr. Chase for about 30-40 minutes, I felt like he was a very sincere and professional lawyer, one that would represents his client with their best interest at heart. In my opinion Mr. Chase would be a very good fit for my business because he actually has a great deal of knowledge about the subject and is well educated about entertainment law overall. References: http://www.entertainmentlawyermiami.com/ http://www.lawyers.com/lawharvard/