Pryor Cashman Partner Donald Zakarin, co-chair of the Litigation Group, has been named a 2023 MVP for Intellectual Property by Law360.

Law360 describes Don as “a music industry veteran who has spent the past year defending Ed Sheeran from various high- and low-profile infringement accusations,” and he discusses the landmark case in the MVP profile:

“Anybody who writes successful, popular music, particularly popular music in a particular idiom, which uses basic chord progressions … those people are going to be more susceptible to being sued; they just are,” said Zakarin. He has been representing the pop singer behind hits like “Shape of You” and “Thinking Out Loud” since 2015, when the latter record started attracting threats of litigation amid accusations that it ripped off the Marvin Gaye record “Let’s Get It On,” a No.1 hit in 1973.

Zakarin said Sheeran — who he now affectionately calls “Ed” — had pulled Zakarin’s card based on the lawyer’s years of representing “both Warner and Sony,” the two major music industry powerhouses that sell Sheeran’s music and publish his songwriting, respectively.

The most dramatic of the lawsuits over the similarity between “Let’s Get it On” and “Thinking Out Loud” hit a jury in May, and Zakarin and his colleagues persuaded jurors that there wasn’t anything legally protectable about the chord progressions that the songs shared.

“Ed gets sued because he writes popular music,” said Zakarin, who added that “a lot of people who bring these cases don’t understand how much of music is built upon common musical building blocks.”

He also tells Law360 about what motivates him in the work he does, why he likes working for clients in the music business, and more.

Don is one of 171 lawyers from 76 firms that Law360 says “have distinguished themselves from their peers by securing hard-earned successes in high-stakes litigation, complex global matters and record-breaking deals.”

Read the full MVP profile using the link below (subscription may be required).