Overview
In the era of social media and rapid technological change, the media landscape has become dynamic, pivotal, and increasingly complicated. The Rothwell Figg Media and Constitutional Law practice operates at the intersection of technology, law, and innovation, and provides clients with legal guidance leavened by tested and proven knowledge gained through representing some of the most renowned names and media brands in the world. The New York Times, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Fox, The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, News Corp., Univision, Bloomberg, Gannett, Princeton University Press, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Netflix, TripAdvisor, Forbes, and Advance Publications/Conde Nast, among others, have relied on our guidance.
Our lawyers have the hands-on technical knowledge needed to counsel clients concerning digitization, artificial intelligence and machine learning, the Internet of Things, and a host of other cutting-edge topics. We simultaneously have the legal knowledge needed to deal with patent, copyright, privacy, cybersecurity, defamation, and First Amendment law at the highest levels. Our integration of technical, business, and IP acumen allow us to advise media industry clients on a deep level and to communicate effectively with management and in-house legal teams, as well as with their technology and business professionals.
We advise media clients on the protection of their intellectual property. These matters can range from disputes and allegations over ownership of technology to disagreements over ownership of content to both. With respect to the former, we have defended over 80 lawsuits alleging patent infringement for media clients. These typically involve the technical features of their industry-leading websites or the delivery mechanisms for their content.
We help media clients defend the integrity of their content. We are their advocates when others steal their content, impersonate their reporters, scrape their websites, or simply attemp to interfere with their reporting.
We guide media clients on libel issues and provide pre-publication libel review of potentially controversial material. We have counseled media entities, reporters, authors, and publishers on a wide variety of defamation-related issues.
We have a deep expertise in issues relating to the First Amendment issues of religious liberty. We have represented entities such as Chabad, The National Synagogue, The Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, Rabbi Avi Weiss, the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition, the Macedonia Baptist Church, and others on issues involving religious liberties. We have challenged the scheduling of elections on religious holidays, represented individuals who have been fired or denied security clearances as a result of their religious observance or activities, and assisted religious institutions that have been harassed by local authorities for their efforts to exercise their religious liberties.
We are committed to representing reporters and authors and recently successfully concluded the groundbreaking representation (on a pro bono basis) of award-winning journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who was the target of an attack with a flashing strobe light by an Alt-Right neo-Nazi who intended to trigger in Mr. Eichenwald an epileptic seizure and to kill him.
We take a strategic view of these situations, guiding clients through the intersection of intellectual property and technology, and advising them on operational issues such as how you let visitors post content, what it means legally for them to be on your website, what kind of website language will shield clients from which kinds of liability, how to qualify for safe harbor(s), and more. We provide similar, 360-degree advice on other company-critical topics, such as privacy, the implications of data security, and the use of open-source code.
