Manager, Legal Affairs

Job Description:

At Warner Music Group, we’re a global collective of music makers and music lovers, tech innovators and inspired entrepreneurs, game-changing creatives and passionate team members. Here, we turn dreams into stardom and audiences into fans. We are guided by three core values that underpin everything we do across all our diverse businesses:

• Curiosity: We do our best work when we’re immersing ourselves in culture and breaking through barriers. Curiosity is the driving force behind creativity and ingenuity. It fuels innovation, and innovation is the key to our future.
• Collaboration: Making music and bringing it to the world is all about the power of originality amplified by teamwork. A great idea, like a great song, travels globally. We ignite passions and build connections across our diverse community of artists, songwriters, partners, and fans.
• Commitment: We pursue excellence for our team and our talent. Everything in music starts with a leap into the unknown, and we’re committed to keeping the faith, acting with integrity, and delivering on our promises.

We remain committed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. We know it fosters a culture where you can truly belong, contribute, and grow. We encourage applications from people of any age, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, religion, ethnicity, disability, veteran status, and any other characteristic or identity.

Consider a career at WMG and get the best of both worlds – an innovative global music company that retains the creative spirit of a nimble independent.

Job Title: Manager, Legal Affairs, Business and Legal Affairs

A little bit about our team:

Warner Music’s Center of Excellence opened in 2017 and is the home to the financial, legal, and administrative functions that provide critical support and best-in-class services to our US Recorded Music and Publishing businesses. The Nashville center embodies the innovative and creative spirit that stems from the company’s deep history in nurturing entrepreneurial thinking and artist-focused innovation, enabling our employees to develop a wide range of skills through cross-function collaboration and development opportunities.

As part of the Global Catalog Business and Legal Affairs team, the Legal Department is responsible for enforcing WMG’s rights in the recorded music catalog repertoire controlled by its U.S. record labels, managing litigations involving WMG’s recorded music rights in conjunction with WMG’s corporate litigation in-house counsel, fielding inquiries and claims from third parties, researching WMG’s recorded music catalog rights, filing applications to register copyrights in and to WMG’s recorded music repertoire, and managing WMG’s relationships with the labor unions with which WMG’s U.S. record labels have collective bargaining agreements.

Members of the Legal Department work closely with employees in the Business Affairs, Finance, Production, Operations, New Media, and Marketing departments of each label client to fulfill the above-referenced responsibilities for the recordings and records those labels release.

Your role:

This position will conduct general legal research pertaining to WMG’s rights in its existing recording agreements and advise various internal business units regarding those rights and recording agreements. In addition, this role will field, research, answer, and resolve inquiries from both internal business units and artists, producers, and other third parties.  This role will deal predominantly with WMG’s catalog repertoire and Rhino label.

Here you’ll get to:

• Draft, review and approve letters of direction for payee changes from recording artists, producers, and other third party royalty participants and their representatives
• Review Estate documentation for recording artists, producers and other third party royalty participants and draft letters of direction for estates/beneficiaries, where needed
• Review, analyze and interpret various provisions in the recording agreements that govern WMG’s existing catalog recordings, and accurately and succinctly communicate findings to appropriate individual or department
• Conduct chain of title review and provide concise analysis
• Prepare contract summaries of the recording and other agreements that govern WMG’s existing catalog recording assets
• Review accounting and royalty provisions in recording and other agreements and work with finance/royalty teams to ensure that payment requirements are met
• Perform general research pertaining to WMG’s rights in its existing recording agreements
• Conduct research within internal royalty systems, databases and files
• Assist the corporate in-house litigation