Hustle & Focus! Dina LaPolt Of LaPolt Law And SONA On How to Break Into The Biz

(Courtesy Dina LaPolt) –
LEADERS OF THE NEW SCHOOL: Dina LaPolt (center, purple shirt) with Sofi, Tommy Lee and deadmau5 (left) at King Drew High School in Compton as part of the Urban Fitness 911 program to inspire kids to get into the industry.

Dina LaPolt is a brilliant (and brassy) entertainment attorney, entrepreneur, benefactor and social justice warrior who works on the front lines of the music industry while doing her best to pay it forward. Her LaPolt Law is one of the largest and most prominent entertainment law firms owned and founded by a female attorney and represents some of the biggest in the biz, including Steven Tyler, deadmau5, Cardi B, Offset, 21 Savage and iann dior. She is also co-founder of the advocacy group Songwriters of North America; serves on the board of We Are R.I.S.E., an organization empowering girls of color living in South L.A.; and on the Executive Leadership Committee of the Black Music Action Coalition.

If that weren’t enough, for 19 years LaPolt also taught the “Legal & Practical Aspects of the Music Business” class at UCLA, which provided 10 scholarships to students at King Drew High School in Compton through Urban Fitness 911, where LaPolt was a board member. Along the way, she helped foster hundreds of music industry careers. Execs like Vanessa Angiuli, Interscope Records’ director of A&R, and Shannon Bayersdorfer, who manages jxdn, credit LaPolt’s mentorship and guidance. Here, in conjunction with this week’s Next Gen Special issue, this highly esteemed attorney gives us her informed take on what it takes to break into this constantly evolving business .

Impact: Next Gen 2021—The Next Is Now

Pollstar: You taught the “Legal & Practical Aspects of the Music Business” class at UCLA for 19 years. What were the common traits of the students who went on to make it in the industry?
Dina LaPolt: You have to have consistency and know what you want to do. Everybody that succeeds is very focused. When you’re unfocused and you have five things you want to do – you’re an A&R person, but you manage people and want to run a label – you can’t be like that in the beginning because that works against you. That does not help you when you meet someone in the business when you are first starting out. My first thing is I’m a lawyer. That is my skill set. That is what I built my business on, running an entertainment law firm. That’s what we do. We negotiate contracts and we get agreements signed. That is our core business. You need to have a core. These young people coming up today want to do everything: “Well, I’m a manager, but I’m also an A&R person and I also…” It’s like, “What?!” You have to figure out what it is you want to go for, you have to build consistency in that area to get credibility.

We live in a time where increasingly everyone is expected to do everything. If you’re young and you’re working with an artist, you might do social media, marketing, booking, branding, executive producing and more.
Yes, if you’re managing that artist, that’s what you’re doing. If you’re coming to somebody like an Ethiopia [Habtemariam of Motown] or a John Platt [of Sony/ATV Publishing] and on your resumé is digital marketer, went to law school and managed these artists, that doesn’t help you if what they’re looking for is very specific.

(Courtesy LaPolt Law) –
WALK IT TALK IT: Dina LaPolt (fourth from left) with clients Cardi B and Offset and LaPolt Law attorneys Mariah Comer and Lindsay Arrington who interned at LaPolt Law while in law school.

Isn’t it desirable to have a lot of skills?
But what’s your core function? What do you do? I’m a music lawyer, but you know what? How many times have I put people together in a room to collaborate that have created an award-winning song? How many times have I made a call and had someone added to a festival? How many times have I got someone out of ICE detention? These are not my core jobs. I’m a music lawyer.

Sounds like you should be a manager.
Well, I was a manager. I fucking hated it.

You’re also an advocate and can tune a freaking guitar if you need to.
I can tune a guitar. That’s absolutely true.

–
Vanessa Angiuli, a former student of LaPolt, is Director of A&R at Interscope Records.

You’ve said before that teaching kept your head in the game in a way that you might not when you practice law. Do you think it’s good to stay in school?
Yes, but it’s good to not just have classroom experience, but also to try to broaden it out to the real world. They need to know the business and that’s really important. Whether they are managers, digital media people, agents, lawyers, executives at a record company, A&R, you need to know the business. You don’t have to know the intricacies of paragraph 62(A) of a producer agreement, unless you’re a lawyer, of course. But other than that, you do need to know the business, you need to know how producers get paid relative to songwriters, how record deals are structured, what’s recoupable and what’s not recoupable, how music is disseminated, what is publishing, how songwriters are paid relative to how recording artists are paid. You do need to know the business, because if you don’t know the business, you get lost pretty quickly.

So many people in this industry say over and over that it’s a “relationships business,” what about the importance of people skills and networking in this business?
It’s important. But if you’re a dumbass in the dealmaking, people will know that. So you could be the best relationship person in the business, but the minute you get on the phone to try to structure a deal and don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re running at a deficit. Here’s what I always say: the best skill for any executive, manager or any businessperson in the music industry is to be a businessperson and know the intricacies of the business. By the way, I know a lot of attorneys that are not people persons but who are amazing lawyers. If they were people persons would they be better? Probably. And vice versa.

It’s a very strange job market right now with the industry pausing and unpausing and maybe more pausing. A lot of people are pivoting to livestreaming, podcasting, social marketing and becoming multi-hyphenates. What do you think, in today’s job market, young people have to get their foot in the door?
I think it’s important to be super focused and persistent. If they’re applying for a certain job, they have to gear their resume for that job to get the interview. And once you get in the door, it’s a bonus to have additional skills.

(Courtesy Shannon Bayersdorfer) –
LaPolt with Shannon Bayersdorfer, a manager at Maverick who says, “Dina, without a doubt, is the biggest mentor (and champion) I’ve had in this business.”

Are you hiring now?
We are. We’re always looking for interns because I love to have law students that I can really give opportunity to and train, whether we end up hiring them or they end up going to another place, they have experience. It makes them competitive. I love that.

How many people have you hired who were your interns?
Currently, I have several lawyers at my firm who started with me as interns in law school.

What makes a great intern?
They’re a hustler. And they get complicated concepts very quickly. They’re proactive and they don’t have to wait to be asked to do something. We know pretty quickly whether someone’s a keeper or it’s like, “Okay, thanks for coming.” It’s literally, maybe one or two out of 10 who are keepers.

That pretty low.

We try to pick people who want to be on the talent side of the music business. We stopped picking people that don’t know what they want to do yet because those are the people who tend not to be the best. But even the ones who do want to be on the talent side sometimes don’t have what’s required.

What do you think about the importance of diversity?
It’s really, really important. A large percentage of your workforce should be people of color. And gender diversity, too, not just people of color. Seventy percent of my firm is women, 20 percent are people of color. We want it to be more.

Why would someone choose to take your class?
Anything that gives anyone a competitive edge in business is key. That’s why people took my class. Out of 100 people that were in my class each semester, 30 percent were law students or music majors at UCLA, 70 percent were people already in the music business that took my class to get a competitive edge. That’s what I loved about it.

You stopped teaching two years ago, do you miss it?
I do. It’s a lot of work. In the last few years, I had several people involved in the firm helping me, because it’s a lot of work between the 10 internships we give to the kids from King Drew High School in Compton and getting them up here and all the preparation materials and lining up the guest speakers and making the class flow – it’s a lot of work. But I do miss it. Who knows, I might be making a return.