My Fashion (Legal) Odyssey: Part 1
From Wall Street to Fashion Avenue
The year is 1983.
The Police have released their biggest album, Synchronicity, and their biggest hit, Every Breath You Take.
I am a mid-level litigation associate at the major Wall Street law firm that was then called Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. My secretary is punching out my documents on an IBM Selectric typewriter.
At Stroock, I handled a wide variety of business lawsuits. Only one of them had a fashion connection. We represented a top salesman who was a minority shareholder in a moderate-priced ladies sportswear company. He was embroiled in a fierce battle with the company’s majority shareholder, who also owned the factory that supplied the company’s apparel. Our client claimed that his partner was jacking up the apparel prices to inflate his profits at our client’s expense. This issue would play out again in my fashion legal life in a very different setting.
Small events in your life can have big impacts, both for bad and good. One of those events happened to me in 1983. A Stroock partner with whom I had worked closely mainly on real estate litigations came into my office to share an opportunity.
The now iconic Sergio Valente jeans company, which was a client of Stroock, was looking to hire a new in-house General Counsel. Unlike most companies that seek out a business lawyer for such a position, Sergio wanted to hire a litigator, which I was, for this position.
Sergio had two reasons for that preference. They wanted their General Counsel to go after the sellers of counterfeit Sergio jeans in-house. There was an on-going trademark opposition, and they wanted a litigator to ride herd on their outside IP lawyers who were costing them a fortune.
My colleague told me that Sergio would pay me a salary substantially above the compensation I was receiving at Stroock, which already was at the top of the pay scale for a lawyer at my level.
The opportunity intrigued me.
I spoke to one of the owners of Sergio who shared with me his concern about the huge fees being paid to outside counsel — he told me that if I got those fees down, I would receive a bonus for my efforts – I would later get those fees down but unsurprisingly the bonus was never to be. How shocking was that!
I was tired of the dark, cold winters on Wall Street and was ready for a change. The salary increase was not my main motivating factor for the career move. But it didn’t hurt. I moved to 498 Seventh Avenue, a building that was populated by other designer jeans companies such as Jordache and Sasson, and dress companies like The Warren Group. I never looked back.
I like to say it may have been the first and last time that someone left Wall Street for Seventh Avenue and got a raise to do it.
The move to Sergio would change my life.
I would become a keen observer of brands and why they succeed and why they fail. I would represent fashion companies and designers in the US and all over the world, especially in licensing matters. I would represent companies that sold products to TJ Maxx and to Neiman Marcus and to everyone in between. I would represent one of the first and biggest urban brands. I would represent a leading national luxury retailer in contracts to take its stores to China. I would obtain summary judgment for more than $600,000 for a brand owner against a licensee that was desperately trying to weasel out of its minimum royalty obligations. I would found two trade organizations for the fashion industry: The Fashion Roundtable and The Fashion Service Network. I would publish a newsletter called Fashion and the Law. I would run programs at The National Arts Club about the nexus between fashion and art which featured Geoffrey Beene, Nicole Miller, Alexander Julian, Balenciaga, Robert Lee Morris, Ferragamo and many other luminaries. And I would become a clothes horse, buying my Armani and Canali suits at the long-gone fabulous 42nd Street discounter Dollar Bills, and my fun fashion-forward casual clothes in Soho.
The columns that follow will look back at the huge changes in the fashion world since I first joined it and share some of my fashion legal experiences and what can be learned from them.
My Next Article: 7th Avenue in the ’80s – Fashion Would Never Be The Same
Meet the Author
Charles Klein, Esq. Charles Klein is a partner and chair of the Fashion Law Group of Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP, a mid-size, midtown Manhattan law firm. DHC has been helping clients solve challenging problems since 1975.
Although he handles a wide variety of business law matters for clients, Mr. Klein’s practice is particularly focused on the fashion, accessories, and home industries, where he helps his clients build their businesses, obtain protection for their intellectual property, protect their brand assets, and negotiate their license agreements and other contracts.
