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Eve Konstan steps down as general counsel of Spotify. Konstan took the legal reins of Stockholm-based Spotify in May 2020 following a nearly year-long stint as general counsel of WarnerMedia and a 20-year career at HBO, where she spent the final five years as GC. She began her career as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. Konstan worked out of Spotify’s New York City office. Konstan’s tenure at Spotify coincided with a golden era for the music streaming service. Rapid growth led to a tripling of Spotify’s stock price, pushing its market capitalization above $100 billion. Spotify confirmed Konstan’s departure but did not provide information on who will succeed her. In a LinkedIn post, Konstan wrote, "Whether this marks the end of my full-time for-profit endeavors remains to be seen … I’m looking forward to dedicating more time to the non-profit and educational causes that inspire me ….” Spotify is the world’s largest music streaming service. The company, which generated more than $16 billion in revenue in 2024 and employs about 9,000 workers, has 640 million monthly active users, including 252 million paying subscribers. … Priya Aiyar is Warner Bros. Discovery’s new legal chief. She arrives from American Airlines Group, where he was executive vice president of corporate affairs and chief legal officer. Aiyar succeeds Warner Bros. Discovery chief legal officer Savalle Sims. Sims and the New York City-based entertainment company did not publicly explain Sims’ departure. Discovery Inc. CEO David Zaslav hired Sims as general counsel of that company in 2011, and seven years later she played a key role in Discovery’s $14.6 billion acquisition of Scripps Network properties including HGTV and Food Network. Sims also helped Discovery pull off its $43 billion purchase of WarnerMedia from AT&T in 2022 — the transaction that created Warner Bros Discovery — and stayed on as legal chief of the merged companies. Aiyar’s prior positions include Willkie Farr & Gallagher in Washington, DC, where she was a partner in its litigation and global trade and investment groups. Before that, Aiyar served as acting general counsel for the U.S. Department of Treasury, deputy general counsel for the U.S. Department of Energy and legal adviser to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Aiyar’s new role will offer plenty of challenges. Warner Bros’ Discovery shares have fallen by more than half in the nearly three years since the companies merged. The business is weighed down by more than $40 billion in debt while it also copes with the decline in cable TV, its largest source of revenue. Aiyar could not be immediately reached for comment. … Law firm Paul Hastings has picked up former Willkie Farr & Gallagher music and digital media practice group chair Sid Fohrman. Fohrman joins Paul Hastings as a partner and chair of the firm’s music industry practice based in the firm’s Century City, CA, office. He represents a wide array of clients including talent, public figures, private and public companies and asset managers related to their work with live events and entertainment. Fohrman also advises music labels, publishers, media companies and content creators on transactions. Clients Fohrman has represented include Banc of California, BMG Rights Management, TikTok, Warner Music Group and Primary Wave Entertainment. Fohrman previously worked at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld as a senior associate, then at Barnes & Thornburg as a partner for seven years. More recently, he worked at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton as a partner and chair of its music and esports and games practices for four years. He moved his practice to Willkie in January 2022. … Meanwhile, Doug Emhoff — an entertainment attorney in Los Angeles and husband of former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris — who stepped away from his law partnership at DLA Piper in November of 2020 to serve as the second gentlemen during the Biden administration, has joined Willkie, Farr & Gallagher as a partner, the Willkie firm said. Emhoff, who was not made available for comment, will split his time between Los Angeles and New York, the firm noted. A 30-year legal industry veteran prior to his time in the White House, Emhoff will advise corporations, boards of directors and individuals in litigation, investigations and other sensitive legal disputes as part of his practice at Willkie. Emhoff, married to Harris since 2014, was once the managing director of Venable’s West Coast business before moving in 2017 to DLA Piper. While Emhoff most recently practiced at DLA Piper, he has a lot of connections at Willkie, noted firm co-chair Thomas Cerabino. “Alex Weingarten, the head of our L.A. office, worked with Doug at Venable,” he said in an interview. “Doug’s practice also overlaps with [entertainment transactions chair] Allan Epstein’s practice, as Doug does a lot of work in the entertainment space. And Michele Mulrooney [chair of the private wealth group in Los Angeles] has a lot of wealthy clients in the entertainment space.” Matthew Feldman, another Willkie firm co-chair, said Emhoff’s “deep knowledge of global markets, policy and the law will be an invaluable resource to our firm’s teams and our clients.” In addition, Emhoff will continue to serve as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center in DC. … Duetti, the music-financing platform that has raised more than $235 million to help independent artists monetize their catalogs, has hired Sachin Premnath as its first general counsel. Premnath joins Duetti from Netflix, where he helped manage that company’s vast library of master and publishing assets commissioned from composers, artists and songwriters. While Duetti is based in New York City, Premnath will work from Los Angeles. During his five years at Netflix, he also helped shape the music strategy for its gaming division. Before Netflix, Premnath led international content acquisition at Sony Entertainment Network and was a partner in Reed Smith’s London office, where he specialized in music, digital entertainment and corporate matters, acquiring multiple catalogs (and catalog businesses) for clients. … The Metropolitan Museum of Art has hired Paul Pineau, general counsel of Johns Hopkins University for the past decade, as general counsel and secretary. The Met is the largest art museum in the United States and the fourth largest in the world. Pineau will succeed Sharon Cott, who is retiring after 37 years with the nonprofit. The Met, which spans more than 14 acres on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and boasts more than 2 million square feet of space, is home to a litany of masterpieces from around the world. Prior to Johns Hopkins, Pineau served as chief of staff and special assistant state’s attorney in the Office of the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City. The Met did not release details on Pineau’s compensation, but in the museum’s fiscal year that ended June 30, 2023, the latest period available, Cott’s compensation totaled $553,140, according to an Internal Revenue Service filing. The filing said The Met has 2,100 employees and that it closed the year with revenue of $762 million and assets of $5.6 billion. … Veteran transactions attorney Kamaal Jones has landed his first chief legal officer post and it’s in the big baseball league. The new ownership of the Baltimore Orioles hired Jones away from Washington, DC-based Monumental Sports & Entertainment, owner of the National Basketball Association’s Washington Wizards and the National Hockey League’s Washington Capitals, and operator of Capital One Arena, where those two teams play. Jones had been with Monumental three years, most recently serving as senior vice president and associate general counsel. Before that, Jones spent a decade at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, where he served as associate general counsel, and a combined five years as an associate at Venable and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. Jones is among a slew of prominent hires that private equity titan David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, has made since acquiring control of the Orioles a year ago from the Angelos family. The deal valued the Orioles at $1.725 billion, the third-highest price tag ever for a Major Leagues Baseball team. Other members of Rubinstein’s ownership group include ex-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Orioles hall-of-famer Cal Ripken Jr. and NBA hall-of-famer Grant Hill. … Law firm Littler Mendelson announced the arrival in Washington, DC of Daniel Nash, Stacey Eisenstein and Nathan Oleson, three new shareholders from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld who focus on labor and employment issues related to the professional and collegiate sports industries. While at Akin, Nash served as co-chair of that firm’s labor and sports law practices and was a member of the firm’s management committee. He represents clients in a variety of complex labor and employment matters and has worked on high-profile cases involving both professional and amateur athletes. In 2015, The New York Law Journal reported that Nash led a team of Akin attorneys who represented the National Football League in litigation stemming from the now-infamous Tom Brady football deflation controversy, which had made national headlines. In a recent statement, Nash said: “Littler’s vast footprint, ties to Washington, and its robust resources will allow me to collaborate with colleagues throughout the U.S. and around the globe to deliver successful outcomes for our clients, as well as contribute to the firm’s continued growth by expanding its reach in the sports industry.” Like Nash, Eisenstein throughout her career has also represented sports leagues, teams and employers in the sports and entertainment industries, with some of her past cases involving player discipline and collective bargaining agreement enforcement. She has also taught sports law at Georgetown University as an adjunct professor. Oleson specializes in employer defense in complex employment litigation, and has successfully counseled sports clubs, associations and universities in high-profile disputes with athletes and sports officials in compensation, discipline and health and safety matters. … New York City-based entertainment company Sirius XM Holdings disclosed in a regulatory filing that Patrick Donnelly was retiring after serving as general counsel since May 1998. The filing said his current employment agreement expired in January and wouldn’t be renewed. Instead, the parties negotiated a transition agreement under which the 63-year-old Donnelly will remain general counsel until April, when he’ll transition to a part-time role running through year-end to help facilitate the transition to his successor. The company had not yet selected that person. As GC, Donnelly served on the front lines as the media industry underwent a historic transformation over the last three decades. He joined Sirius more than a year before it launched its first satellites, marking the birth of the satellite radio industry, and a decade later he helped engineer Sirius’s $13 billion acquisition of rival satellite radio company XM. In recent years, Sirius XM has been buffeted by digital media competition from every direction, from Spotify to iHeartMedia. Sirius XM subscriptions have steadily declined since peaking at 34.91 million in late 2019 and now stand at 33.2 million. In 2023, Donnelly was the company’s fifth-highest paid executive, earning $2.8 million in compensation, including salary of $1.03 million and a bonus of $1.8 million. Regulatory filings suggest Donnelly required some coaxing to stay around this long. He reached the contract that just expired in November 2022. To induce him to stay aboard, the company at that time awarded him a special stock grant valued at $1.2 million and a special stock-option grant valued at $2.3 million that caused his 2022 pay to surge to $8.8 million. The disclosure of Donnellys exit plan from Sirius XM comes weeks after the company suffered a court defeat in New York with a judge finding it violated the federal Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by forcing subscribers to hear repeated retention offers before canceling. Though the judge denied most of New York Attorney General Letitia James claims, including that Sirius XM had engaged in defraud and deception, Sirius XM planned to appeal the finding of “technical violations.” … Walt Disney Co. Chief Legal and Compliance Officer Horacio Gutierrez, who ranked 16th on Corporate Counsel and ALM Intelligence’s 2024 highest-paid legal chief list, is likely to crack the top 10 in this year’s list thanks to a 36% jump in pay. In its proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in January, the Burbank, CA-based company reported that Gutierrez received compensation totaling $15.8 million in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 28. That’s up from $11.7 million the previous year. Gutierrez was the third-highest-paid executive at the entertainment giant in 2024, behind CEO Bob Iger ($41.1 million) and Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston ($24.5 million). Gutierrez received salary of $1.5 million, $7.6 million in stock, $2.4 million in stock options and $4.3 million in cash incentive compensation. The payouts for top brass reflected Disney’s strong year. The performance of its streaming business sharply improved, and three of the four top-grossing films of the year were Disney productions — Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine and Moana 2. Disney’s stock price rose 22% for the year, a hair below the 23% advance for the overall market, as measured by the S&P 500. Gutierrez joined Disney in late 2021 after five years at Spotify. Before that he spent 17 years at Microsoft, rising to the No. 2 legal position of general counsel. The proxy statement listed “performance highlights” for each executive. For Gutierrez, the list included the “successful settlement” of litigation stemming from a spat with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over his signing into law a bill — dubbed “Don't Say Gay” by critics — that has restricted discussion of sexual identity and gender identity in schools. After Disney spoke out against the legislation, DeSantis maneuvered to strip Disney of authority over a powerful central Florida real estate board. The proxy also praised Gutierrez for his work on “Disney Lawyers in Film,” a program that brings aboard new counsel following two years of specialized training. Also resolved last year was a lawsuit brought by female Disney employees in California who alleged they were paid $150 million less than their male colleagues over an eight-year stretch. Disney settled the case in November for $43 million.
— Samson Amore, Greg Andrews, Jon Campisi, Trudy Knockless, Chris O’Malley, James Palmer and Patrick Smith contributed to this report.
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