From the best-selling book, UNDERSTANDING THE LAW: A PRIMER, Chapter 21, "Representing the Celebrity Client", pages 225-252, by Attorney Charles Jerome Ware (2008).
Keeping the celebrity client grounded is absolutely essential. If you lack the ability to keep your client grounded, do not represent them.
I have had the fortune and misfortune, pleasure and agony, opportunity and experience of representing several celebrities during my more than thirty years in the business of law. Most of them have been wonderful clients. Many have presented "special" issues or problems that necessitated additional care and concern regarding the impact on their careers and on the successful outcome of their legal matters. All of them have blessed me with wonderful legal challenges to deal with. I thank them profusely for these challenges.
When it comes to celebrities and the justice system, both civil and criminal, the differences between the advantages of fame and the disadvantages of fame can be stark.
Former United States Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger, in the Nixon Administration, was frequently called "Super K" because of his many travels and foreign policy adventures in the 1970s. One of his more prominent trips during the Nixon Administration was to China to discuss trade with China's leader, Mao Zedong, in 1973. As recently as 2003, thirty years after the trip, a celebrity feminist client of mine approached me with the idea of filing a lawsuit against "someone in our government" because of overtures allegedly made to the United States by way of Kissinger from Mao. The proposed plan by this client was that the lawsuit would raise awareness to women's issues in China. I declined to file the suit.
The following, as I recall, was the subject raised by my celebrity client: In the middle of a presumably very serious discussion of proposed increased trade between China and the United States, as Secretary of State Kissinger reported, Chinese Leader Mao Zedong proposed, or offered, to send up to ten million Chinese women to the United States to live. Apparently the response of the stunned but ever diplomatic Kissinger to the ludicrous proposal was, 'We will have to study it." I believed it would have been frivolous use of my client's celebrity to have brought a lawsuit against anyone under the circumstances presented.
If you cannot keep your celebrity client grounded, do not represent them. To do otherwise will be a disaster for both of you.
Publication Date: 11/18/2008
Number of Pages: 253
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