Student blogger:
Samantha Morgenstern (’14)

 

“Why do you want to be a lawyer?” After starting law school, this became a question I could not answer easily, especially during my frustratingly uncertain 1L year.

But my interest in music (and entertainment law) propelled me forward because music has motivated and influenced me throughout my life. When I was a child, I listened to Fleetwood Mac and Eric Clapton with my mom in the car on the way to school and my former-hippie uncle instilled in me a love for The Beatles even while I was singing the latest Backstreet Boys singles into a hairbrush. I used to spend time writing album reviews, working at a music venue/waffle restaurant and in guitar, piano, and songwriting classes in college because I wanted to surround myself with music.

When I discovered that The Fender Music Foundation’s (FMF) offices are only ten minutes from my hometown in Thousand Oaks, I decided it was fate, and I had to go for it. I contacted the Executive Director, and after interviewing, I landed the legal internship position and started working with FMF just before I began classes as a transfer 2L at Chapman Law. Things started to turn around.

Through this internship, I have come to find that entertainment law is an all-encompassing field that may draw upon tort, constitutional, contract and intellectual property law (among other areas) in potentially complicated ways. I have worked closely with the Executive Director of the Foundation in drafting policies on warehouse safety, volunteer and employee agreements, and agreements for artists and others looking to work with the Foundation. I receive feedback on all work products from advising attorneys and Foundation Board Members, including the CEO of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation.

In addition to my work with FMF, the entertainment law classes I have been taking have made me feel like I have found my niche in transactional and entertainment law. I completed International Entertainment and International Sports Law classes while studying abroad in London last summer. I studied Entertainment Law with Professor Mary Lee Ryan last fall, and now I am taking Intellectual Property with Professor Tom Bell and Negotiating and Drafting Media Industry Transactions with Professor Kathy Heller. This semester, I have genuinely enjoyed learning how to formulate deal points and draft agreements in Professor Heller’s class, and I could probably geek out with Professor Bell and my seven other IP classmates on trademark issues for longer than the one hour and fifteen minute class period will permit.

Whenever I hear someone warn me of the difficulty of breaking into the entertainment industry, I think of Ellen Barkin’s words in the absurd—albeit loveable—romantic comedy Someone Like You: “Remember it is all about the get. We cannot make a splash if we only get the gets that everybody has already got. I need the ungettable get.” Although the journey will be difficult, my internship experience and the entertainment law-centric classes I have been taking have made the dream of becoming an entertainment lawyer feel like an attainable reality.

About the author
Sam Morgenstern graduated from Syracuse University in 2010 and worked in online journalism before she decided to attend law school to pursue a career in entertainment law. She transferred to Chapman in Fall 2012 and recently finished a legal internship at Fender. She could chat at length about music, television, film, and all kinds of media, so look out for her blog posts if you are interested in these areas, too.

The views expressed in the student blogs are those of the author and not the law school.