Variety’s 2023 Legal Impact Report has recognized six Pryor Cashman Media and Entertainment Partners as among the top attorneys serving Hollywood and other entertainment industry clients:

• Ilene Farkas
• Briana Hill
• Simon Pulman
• James Sammataro
• Frank Scibilia
• Benjamin Semel

Ilene, James, Frank, and Ben were lauded as a top Music Litigation team; Briana and Simon were praised for their Media + Entertainment transactional work.

In its profile of the litigation team, Variety notes:

Two significant rulings last summer from the Copyright Royalty Board — to uphold the royalty rate increase from 10.5% to 15.1% for streaming services in the 2018-2022 term, and settlement on a 15.35% rate for the 2023-2027 term — were the latest wins scored by Semel and Scibilia on behalf of music publishers and songwriters. In March, plaintiffs dropped a claim against Benny Blanco, Halsey, Khalid, Ed Sheeran and others over the 2018 hit “Eastside,” bolstering Farkas’ track record in copyright infringement cases while Sammataro represents the estate of Chris Cornell in a dispute with Soundgarden and Chris Brown in a claim against Brown’s song “Pills & Automobiles.”

For the transactions team, Variety says:

In recent months, they’ve jointly negotiated deals for the production companies Sister (including deals to for a TV adaptation of Alaina Urquhart’s book “The Butcher & The Wren” with Jennifer Yale as showrunner, and an upcoming 9/11 series written by Tobias Lindholm and starring Jeremy Strong) and Blumhouse (acquisitions of Sundance hit “Nanny” and novella “Blind Spot” for a streaming feature adaptation for its Amazon output deal). Additionally, they handled business and legal affairs for prodcos Wiip and 88 Rising, and numerous videogame film and TV adaptations, including DJ2’s (“Sonic the Hedgehog” and “Tomb Raider”) first look deal with Amazon.

The report quotes Ilene on the “busy year for Pryor Cashman’s music and entertainment practices,” with litigation wins ranging “from successfully representing a significant number of artists, labels and publishers in music copyright disputes, to securing a historic win for songwriters and music publishers in the Copyright Royalty Board proceedings, to defending creators and streaming services against attacks on their First Amendment rights to creative freedom.”

Briana is quoted on how’s the industry variations in dealmaking pace affect the firm’s M+E transactional work: “It just depends on whether things are in a faster cycle, a slower cycle and how much awareness people have of what’s happening.”

See the full 2023 Legal Impact Report using the link below.