www.forbes.com: As a lawyer specializing in providing legal clearances on films and television projects, I review projects to ensure that the exploitation of that project will not give rise to any type of viable legal claim against the production. The word viable is key since many people may think they have a claim even if they don’t. A clearance lawyer’s work includes reviewing the content for all possible legal claims, including issues related to copyright, trademark, and personal rights.
3 comments:
The role of clearance lawyer is not one that I had previously known existed. The need for someone to go over a documentary and make sure nobody has any right to sue is a job that seems obvious looking back now. It also seems to be an extremely vital role. I'd be really curious to see about how exactly a clearance lawyer goes about their day and doing their job. They obviously have to look at something and be able to say "We could be sued for this" or "There's no basis for us to be sued here", but when in the process do they decide that? Do they watch the interviews and go over the script? Or do they look at the final product and make decisions there? I imagine it's some form of both. I also wonder how much one would make in the role of clearance lawyer, as well if they work for a single company or if it's by contract for them.
I didn’t think that legal clearances would be an issue that filmmakers and media would have to face. On one hand classifying documentaries as journalistic work that falls under similar laws to other journals with rules to have a reasonable claim especially if the claim is incriminating makes sense and should be that way. On the other hand, I just hadn’t really given it much thought that there would need to be a team to make sure that all the information is legally sound and not sue-able. This makes me trust documentaries and other true crime shows more than I have in the past knowing that there are not just a team of people researching the work but also lawyers who fact check the legal bases, which insinuates pretty clearly that the information they are saying would be true else it could be slander. On yet another different hand, this also makes me question if there are loopholes that have certain perfectly true media and facts be, perhaps unintentionally, censored due to shaky legal standing.
I've always wondered how some of these true crime & shakedown documentaries got away with it. The legal world as a whole is a very complicated place, and you can be sued for a lot of things (whether or not you will make settlement is another story, but people can certainly try). Despite all the vetting they describe in this piece, there are a lot of pieces that do end up getting lawsuits, sometimes SLAPP suits thrown at them, and then its up to the studio to decide if the message they're putting out is worth the fiscal risk. But its interesting the process that even the not-constantly-sued movies have to go through in order to achieve that litigationless position.
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