Meitus Strohm

Announcing our new entertainment law partnership

What does the symbol mean? Why this color choice? Why not “Meitus Strohm, LLP,” the proper name of the company? These are things we obsessed about; ask us in ten years and we’ll have probably forgotten. I can tell you my paternal grandfather, a hero to me, was fascinated by owls and had a large collection of owl art and figurines.

It’s been an exciting week around the launch of a new boutique entertainment law firm, Meitus Strohm, with my partner Robert Meitus. I’m in full shouting from the rooftop mode, so I thought I’d use my weekly Substack to give a little background on how I got here - how we got here.

Twenty-five years ago, at age 32, I surprised everyone in my life by suddenly deciding to go to law school. My parents thought I’d lost my mind. Even Heather, my girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, seemed surprised by my abrupt announcement.¹ She encouraged me to think beyond music as a career, but law school seemed to come out of nowhere. Honestly, if you’d have told me even at 25 that I’d be a lawyer in my thirties, I’d have laughed it off as nonsense.

But it didn’t come out of nowhere; I’d been thinking about it as I finished up my long-neglected undergrad degree. When the Lemonheads broke up in 1998, I moved to Birmingham because that’s where Heather lived. As I struggled to keep the wheels on my music career, I had time to finish a history degree at UAB. As proud as I felt to graduate from college in my thirties, I realized a history degree wouldn’t open many doors. I felt called to find a way to serve creative people, and a law degree seemed like a good way to invent a career on the business side of music.

I went to Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, a private law school with a solid regional reputation. I did much better than I expected academically, and all of my employment opportunities were in Alabama. I took a job with a large general practice firm, where I fell in with a practice group specializing in commercial lending and real estate…not exactly what I’d set out to do, but I felt grateful to have a job. Heather and I had two of our three kids during my time in law school and bar exam prep; I didn’t have much time to reflect on what I wanted to do. Then in 2008, a few years into practice, the bottom fell out of the financial markets and - like many young corporate lawyers working at law firms - I suddenly had very little work.

Remember that time? Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, mortgage-backed securities? That event froze the entire commercial lending industry. Partners hoarded work and many associate lawyers lost their jobs - every lawyer is judged on billable hours and collections. No work, no revenue, eventually no job. It was a scary time to be a lawyer.

By that time, I’d left a large firm for a mid-sized firm that supported my efforts to bring in music clients. I’d handled a few small deals here and there, but I didn’t have the sort of proficiency I needed to handle work nobody else in my firm understood. I hadn’t had the opportunity to learn entertainment law in school, so I pitched my alma mater, Cumberland, on an entertainment law class. They hired me as an adjunct professor, and I jumped in right over my head.

In a panic, I sought out the help of several seasoned music lawyers who taught entertainment law classes. I met some amazing people who became my mentors: Bertis Downs, longtime advisor to R.E.M.; Ed Pierson, General Counsel of Warner Chappell publishing (who I first met let me out of a deal a few years earlier); and Ken Abdo, an entrepreneurial music lawyer and a big wheel in the American Bar Association Entertainment Forum with a music practice based in Minneapolis. I’m so grateful to each of these legends of the music business, each of whom shared their time, insights, and class materials.

My greatest resource came when I sought out my old acquaintance Robert Meitus, a folk musician who came up in the same Bloomington, Indiana music scene as me. We’d met in passing, but people had been telling me for decades that we look alike. In a wild coincidence, Robert also started law school at Indiana University at age 32 after a decade in the music business. After several years in Los Angeles as the guitarist for a band called East of Eden, moving to NYC to get a masters at Columbia, and then moving to Bloomington with his folk/rock band called The Dorkestra, he began to manage the career of his folk singer wife, Carrie Newcomer. After getting his law degree at IU, he launched a boutique intellectual property firm in Indianapolis and developed entertainment and copyright law classes at IU.

Robert showed me unbelievable generosity by recommending a casebook² and handing over all his teaching materials, including his exams. I told him his exams seemed too easy, and he told me “No, they’re just right - you’ll see.” My first semester teaching I mixed in some questions I considered challenging and earned a reputation. The first semester I had nearly 50 students. The following semester, I had fewer than 30. It took me a few times to understand that some of the concepts that come naturally to me as a lifelong creator are difficult for non-creatives to grasp. For example, lots of students struggled with the concept that a song and a record are separate copyrights. They’d ask, “aren’t they the exact same thing?” Musicians in the room would quickly protest, “NO THEY ARE NOT!”³

Even though Robert is only a couple years ahead of me in law practice, he became a great mentor to me - even when we ended up on opposite sides of a deal or issue. Robert is very open and thoughtful. Like me, he’s a problem-solver, always looking for good outcomes for everyone involved if possible. He’s intellectually curious, analytical, and deeply knowledgeable - which I can’t say for everyone in our niche. As a longtime artist and artist advocate, his approach to the business tends to favor the interests of creative culture and creative individuals. In short, my kind of lawyer, and the kind of lawyer I always strive to be. So many lawyers treat each negotiation as a zero-sum game. Robert is inspiring in that he approaches a negotiation with an openness to building value for everyone involved.

Robert and I quickly became friends, and almost immediately he began his effort to recruit me into his practice. Once I’d finally been forced to make the jump into music law, my practice began to grow and flourish. I pursued an opportunity with the Music Row office of a large, Los Angeles-based law firm with a specialization in entertainment, where I grew a music-centric roster focusing on creative artists. After six years in Nashville, I left law practice to become President of Rounder Records, Carrie’s former longtime label. Robert had multiple clients signed to Rounder, which kept us connected.

I left Rounder in 2022 and joined a large firm doing corporate work that wasn’t too different from the work I did when I first started practice. I was grateful to have the skillset. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to build a music practice again, but referrals started coming in as friends learned I’d returned to practice. It became increasingly clear to me as my music practice grew that the big firm wasn’t the right fit. Thankfully, I never closed the door on my conversations with Robert about merging our practices under a new firm.

When I met Robert’s colleagues and explored their model, it became clear it’s a perfect fit for the business I’ve been building since leaving Concord. As his older partners in his IP boutique retired, Robert moved the firm’s headquarters to my beloved hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. Over 20 years, Robert has developed a small but mighty dream team of well-trained, super smart associate attorneys and staff. After navigating the complicated policies and processes of big firms, it feels incredibly freeing to only be bound by our own competencies, ethical obligations, and commitment to our clients. We’re just a few months in, and it’s by far the best experience I’ve had as a lawyer.

Although I’m happy to have this new connection to my hometown, I’m staying put here in Nashville. One of the firm’s associates has relocated here, and the plan is to continue to build out our Music City presence. With the headquarters in Bloomington, our commitment is to continue to grow here in Nashville.

Now that we’re launched and rebranded, what’s our mission? Meitus Strohm is focused on creative fields, representing creative clients and compaies that support and resource creative individuals. With both of our longtime focus on music and Robert’s recent expansion into film and television, our mission arises from our passionate commitment to support creative careers and businesses that impact the culture. Collectively we work with bigger name artists and established companies, but we have a passion for working to develop opportunities for younger emerging artists and creative people. You’re at least as likely to find us out at shows as in conference rooms or industry functions.

It’s wild how much Robert and I have in common. Our similar appearance makes for a great party trick, but it’s deeper than that. Each of us pursued music and had some success, and through those experiences we each independently pursued a professional path with a goal to represent creative people and companies that serve their interests. I probably should have thrown my lot in with Robert a decade ago, but alas. I have no regrets about my career because it’s the source of the expertise I’ve developed that makes me a fitting partner for such an outstanding lawyer as Robert. Once again in my career, I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity.

1. I remember exactly when I told Heather I wanted to go to law school because I was window shopping for a guitar I couldn’t afford. She told me, right there in Fretted Instruments, that if I graduated from law school she’d buy me the guitar. I forgot the conversation but she didn’t - the evening of my last exam I came home to find an unfamiliar guitar case by the door. I opened it and saw a beautiful Martin HD-28, the exact guitar I was drooling over that day back in 2000.

2. The casebook, Don Biederman’s The Law and Business of the Entertainment Industries, led me to connect with casebook authors Ken Abdo and Ed Pierson. It’s a perfect resource, which sadly hasn’t been updated since 2007. When I started teaching in 2008 it was up-to-date, but by the time I left Birmingham in 2011 it was out-of-date. Sadly there isn’t another casebook nearly as good as Biederman, and that’s partly why I never tried to teach in Nashville. Somebody needs to update that book so I can teach again!

3. In case you’re in the first camp, I’ll make it simple. A sound recording is a fixation of a song, referred to in the Copyright Act as a “musical work.” Think of the great Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah. The original sound recording of Hallelujah is on Cohen’s 1984 album Various Positions. There are, however, hundreds of other recordings of the same song. Every time someone records Hallelujah, it’s licensed by Cohen’s publisher. Sound recordings are the main product of the recording industry, while musical works are subject of the music publishing industry. There are many foundational concepts such as this in entertainment law, which are often much more easily understood by creative individuals.