Any tips on how to transition to entertainment law? Like skills to build? CLEs to take? How to become more appealing to entertainment firms and companies?
For context, I'm currently working in plaintiff side employment.

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I feel like this needs to be said on every post like this, and I wish there was a way to sticky it to the top of this bowl: entertainment is not a practice area; it’s an industry. There are various practice areas within which entertainment clients hire counsel (copyright, employment, production contracts, etc.). And obviously there are needs on both the litigation and transactional sides, which require different skill sets.

The first thing you should do is identify what practice area interests you/you have experience in. Then you need to find a way to apply that to the entertainment industry. You said you have experience in plaintiffs’ side employment: there are lots of opportunities for employment attorneys in the entertainment industry — in-house for studios, gigs at the various industry groups (SAG, Writers’ Guild, etc.), and the various firms that do entertainment-specific employment work (Greenberg Glusker, MSK, and O’Melveny come to mind), to name a few.

At the end of the day, any employer in entertainment is going to look for two things: transferable experience and an actual understanding of what “entertainment” really is (see first paragraph).

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JLC out here fighting the good fight. We really do need a stickie

you must get transactional experience somehow

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