Players On the Move

Christine Lepera has been named Billboard Magazine’s “Lawyer of the Year” in the publication’s “2024 Top Music Lawyers” list. The New York City-based Lepera is Chair of the Music Litigation Practice Group at Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp and a member of the Board of Contributing Editors of Entertainment Law & Finance. … Disney’s Jill Ratner will be joining Sony Pictures Entertainment as general counsel at the end of May, Sony said. Ratner is a veteran entertainment lawyer who spent the last five years as a deputy general counsel for the House of Mouse, where she led a global team of 200 in-house counsel. Ratner joined Burbank, CA-based Disney in 2019, following completion of its $71 billion purchase of 21st Century Fox, where she had worked for nearly 15 years, starting as vice president of litigation and working her way up to executive vice president and deputy general counsel. Ratner led New York-based 21st Century Fox’s global litigation, employment, intellectual property, privacy and content protection legal teams, and advised on the 2007 launch of Hulu. She also played a key role in helping the TV industry prevail in litigation alleging a startup violated copyright by streaming broadcast and cable content over the internet. The Supreme Court sided with the industry 6-3 in a 2014 decision. Sony’s recent announcement comes months after longtime general counsel Leah Weil said she would step down after a 28-year run with the Culver City, CA-based entertainment giant. … Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton has hired Loeb & Loeb media, entertainment and intellectual property litigator Wook Hwang as a partner in the business trial practice group in New York. Robert Friedman, a co-leader of the firm’s business trial group, wrote that Hwang’s deep experience in the entertainment sector strengthens the firm’s capabilities on both coasts. “Wook is a proven first-rate trial lawyer, and he is a go-to advisor for pre-litigation and counseling matters,” Friedman wrote. Hwang represents motion-picture studios, media companies, networks, digital streamers, publishers and brand owners; and has represented major media and entertainment companies in disputes involving copyright, licensing, trademark, false advertising, celebrity endorsements and multimedia distribution rights. He declined to identify his clients but said there is a “large and significant” overlap between his clients and the firm’s clients, and he sees significant potential to grow and expand his client roster at Sheppard Mullin. A spokesperson for Loeb & Loeb did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Hwang’s departure. … The Chicago Bears have added a new legal chief to its executive bench, bringing in Krista Whitaker from the NBA’s Miami Heat as it looks to negotiate a new multi-billion-dollar lakefront stadium. The franchise made the announcement in a blog that also highlighted another key legal hire, Andrea “Andy” Zopp, former managing partner of the Chicago-based venture capital firm Cleveland Avenue who will serve as senior adviser of legal and business affairs for the Bears. Zopp is a veteran Chicago lawyer who earlier spent six years as CEO of the Chicago Urban League and was a deputy mayor and chief neighborhood development officer for the city. The hires come a few months after the Bears parted ways with Cliff Stein, who had been general counsel since 2013 and with the team since 2002. Back in January, Stein confirmed his exit as general counsel and senior vice president to Law.com, an affiliate of Entertainment Law & Finance, but offered no comment beyond a LinkedIn post expressing gratitude for his 22-year run with the team. Both Whitaker and Zopp will work under Kevin Warren, who joined the team as CEO in January 2023 after serving three years as the commissioner of the Big Ten Conference. Whitaker, who will serve as the Bears’ chief legal officer as well as executive vice president of legal and business affairs, had been with the Heat for three years. She joined the team as senior associate counsel and was promoted to associate general counsel 19 months later. Before that, Whitaker was a corporate associate at Proskauer Rose for five years. Warren had hired Proskauer Rose and Whitaker to help negotiate a new media rights deal for the Big Ten, an effort that led to a 2022 agreement with Fox, CBS and NBC that pays the conference more than $7 billion over seven years. Whitaker and her colleagues also counseled the conference on an expansion that will add the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles later this year. … Netflix has confirmed that high-profile legal operations chief Jenn McCarron is no longer with the company. A Netflix spokesperson said that the company had “no additional comment” on the reason for McCarron’s departure or who might replace her. McCarron led legal ops at the streaming giant for more than five years and recently updated her LinkedIn profile to reflect that she left in March. McCarron wrote in a statement posted on her personal website that she is relocating back to New York from Los Angeles, where Netflix is based, and is seeking her “next Strategic Ops adventure.” McCarron joined Netflix in 2018 from Spotify, where she was head of technology. McCarron was previously a technology program manager at Cisco, where she said she learned the ropes from industry trailblazers who went on to found the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), a leading legal ops industry group that McCarron recently took over as president. She has been on the CLOC board since 2020 and hosts the CLOC Talk podcast. McCarron told Law.com in a 2022 interview that she was impressed by Netflix’s culture and “its idyllic speed with no unnecessary process that holds people back.” McCarron said she came to Netflix with the specific goal of building its legal operations foundation “from 0 to 1,” a mission she says has been fulfilled. “Netflix has a tech, data, and ops foundation; the team is staffed by the highest caliber talent handpicked for their innovation, and the organization has accomplished more than anyone thought possible,” McCarron wrote on her website. “With that organization in place, I’m off to design my next adventure and build something new. … I have seen the future of legal ops, and I know that in the coming months and years, we will witness a massive shift in our industry. Every one of us will have to transform actively.” … Meanwhile, David Hyman, who’s been Netflix’s legal chief for more than two decades, received compensation totaling $13.7 million in 2023, his biggest pay haul ever. The payout came under the final year of old executive compensation rules that many shareholders had blasted as excessive. New pay rules for top executives announced in December might lower his comp, something that’s happened just once in the years the Los Gatos, CA-based Netflix has made Hyman’s pay public. Pay for Hyman ballooned in recent years, from the comparatively modest $5.1 million he earned in 2017. But disclosures in the company’s proxy, recently filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, suggest that the compensation committee last year already was beginning to take a more austere approach to the size of packages it awarded Hyman and other top brass. For example, Hyman’s 2023 pay of $13.7 million represented a modest 3.2% increase from his 2022 earnings of $13.3 million (which placed him 18th on Corporate Counsel and ALM Intelligence’s 2023 list of highest-paid legal chiefs). And the compensation committee said it decided to keep his “target total compensation” for 2024 flat from a year earlier. Hyman joined Netflix as legal chief in 2002, just five years after its founding. He’d previously been general counsel of Webvan, an online grocery retailer that went belly up in the dot.com bust, and an attorney at Morrison & Foerster and Arent Fox. For Netflix, 2023 was drenched in drama, including the strikes by actors and writers and layoffs of top Netflix lawyers. But there was an abundance of positives as well, with Netflix seeing a huge payoff from a crackdown on password sharing and winning accolades as the clear victor in the streaming wars that have bludgeoned many of its rivals. Netflix now has 260 million subscribers worldwide, compared with 200 million for Amazon Prime and 150 million for Disney+, according to FlixPatrol. Netflix’s strong performance in 2023 lit a fire under the company’s stock. Since bottoming out at $176 in May 2022, shares marched steadily higher, climbing more than threefold to $610. In the revised compensation program announced in December, the biggest change was the elimination of Netflix’s unusual policy of allowing executives to pick the mix of cash and equity they’ll receive in the coming year.