Entertainment law competition is newest negotiation event at Tulane Law

The art of high-stakes negotiation of entertainment deals is the newest legal negotiation competition at Tulane Law School, part of the institution’s path-charting Sports and Entertainment Law Program.

The Tulane Entertainment Negotiation Competition (TENC) took place in November at Weinmann Hall, and, like Tulane’s nationally recognized sports law negotiation competitions, brought some of the top names in the entertainment industry to Tulane to judge a dozen teams from law schools around the country.

“I modeled this to be like the Tulane Pro Basketball Negotiation Competition,” said Seamus Blair (L’25) whose vision for a negotiation competition tailored to the fast-paced and evolving entertainment world helped shape the Tulane event.

“There are so many similarities between sports law and entertainment law that it made sense for us to grow our entertainment law program by becoming leaders in another competition."

Seamus Blair (L'25), founder and organizer of the Entertainment Negotiation Competition.

Blair founded the Tulane Entertainment and Art Law Society (TEALS) with Class of 2024 alum Greg Wasserstrom and has been planning the event with six other competition board members, many of them students in the Sports Law Program. He took inspiration from a few alumni mentors.

“There are so many similarities between sports law and entertainment law that it made sense for us to grow our entertainment law program by becoming leaders in another competition,” said Blair.

Tulane Law has four sports negotiation competitions in baseball, basketball, football and soccer (futbol), all of them held in the spring and all drawing national recognition not only for the quality of the competitions but also for the networking potential between top industry brass and law students. Blair, who, along with TEALS board member James Dearing (L'25) helped run the Tulane Basketball Negotiation Competition last year, took inspiration from competition founders Chris Robinson and Tim Edwards, both Class of 2018 alumni.

The TENC took 12 teams through multiple rounds over two days, the first one involving a negotiation between a record label and an artist. Teams received basic information about rounds one and two, but details on round three and the championship round, round four, all happened live ensuring that teams could flex their knowledge and command of negotiation strategies.  Each round, however, was based on securing an agreement in an entertainment industry – i.e., music, film, television, and the like.

In between rounds and after hours, like the sports law competitions, the event had plenty of networking opportunities for law students, some of them traveling from as far north as New York (Brooklyn), east as Massachusetts (Harvard Law) and West as Los Angeles (Pepperdine Law).

Among the judges were Tulane Law alum and former president of Sony Pictures TV Studio Jeff Frost (L’89); Academy-award winning producer Robert Fyvolent (A&S '84); Tim Francis (L’84), attorney with Sher Garner Cahill Klein & Hilbert who has represented artists like Stevie Wonder; and Ashlye Keaton (L'03), who runs the nonprofit Ella Project that serves New Orleans' arts and entertainment community and teaches entertainment law at Tulane. Other noteworthy alumni include Dino Gankendorff (A&S '87, L'90) a partner at Provotsy & Gankendorff and Daniel Davillier (L'94) both of whom sponsored the competition.

“The inaugural Tulane Entertainment Negotiation Competition is a big step forward in our broader efforts to grow our already-substantial Entertainment & Sports law footprint at Tulane," said Gabe Feldman, Director of the Sports Law Program. "It’s also the latest proof that our students are among our best assets.  Much like our student-run sports law competitions, which have been a national success for nearly two decades, Seamus and his team have built something special that will bring together students, alumni, and high-profile entertainment professionals for many years.”

TENC board members working with Blair include 3Ls Dearing, Outreach and Prompts Chair, and Rayyan Maqbool, Programming Chair; and 2Ls Daevon Adams, Prompts Chair, Francesqa Kaggwa, Communications Chair, Hallie Feinman, Logistics Chair and Samuel Montanari, Finance Chair. 

For Blair, the competition brings his interests together. He has a music management degree from Emory University and has been a student of music for most of his life. He is a classically trained pianist and plays multiple other instruments including the upright bass and bass guitar. 

“I spent a lot of time after undergrad working with artists but I realized that the best way to have an impact in the music industry was to go to law school,” he said.

Blair, who grew up in upstate New York, comes from a very Tulanian family: His mother, Kelly Mofield (L’94) is a law alum, his father Bryan Blair is a Tulane Medical School graduate and his brother Graham is currently a medical student. But Blair says that wasn't the reason he came to Tulane Law. "When I visited the city, I just fell in love with it," he said. 

He knew he wanted to work in entertainment law, too.

“I definitely knew I wanted to do an event like this and build it up to the level of success that the sports law competitions have had,” he said.