Novel Ideas: Literary Agents, Writers and the Law

April 17, 2014

_{By Jeremy M. Evans ‘11Vice Chair, Entertainment & Sports Law Section of SD County Bar Association}

On Wednesday, April 16, 2014, attorney and author Vince F. Aiello, TJSL Associate Dean William Byrnes, and Mary Wenzel ’10 founder of Write Law, discussed writing as a way to grow and benefit your law practice. 

The event was presented by the Entertainment & Sports Law and Intellectual Property Law Sections of the San Diego County Bar Association. The program covered authorship, negotiating publishing deals, literary agents, and content writing for client leads.

Vince Aiello gave some practical advice on what literary agents do for their clients. What literary agents do: navigate, edit, cheer lead, negotiate, and payment mitigation (their commission). What literary agents do not do: guarantee a sale, level of income, or fame; they are not attorneys and do not write contracts, and they are not ghostwriters. Vince Aiello closed by adding that there are several good literary agents in town. He should know as the author of two novels, with one more in the works.

Associate Dean Byrnes is the author of twenty books and over one-thousand published articles. He discussed how attorneys can develop and maintain client leads through leadership branding by blogging. Associate Dean Byrnes gave the advice that one should write blogs to develop leads, not to be a professor or expert in the field.

Mary Wenzel closed the discussion by describing alternative ways to grow your law practice through ghost writers with content on blogs and websites. She mentioned that writing content needs to be done ethically and efficiently to benefit the attorney’s she has as clients. She smiled when discussing that she is the author of more than one-thousand articles that are not tied to her name, but very much appreciated generating leads for her clients.

In general, writing as we all know can be tedious when writing for work, but it was a breath of fresh air to explore new ways to grow your law practice by writing novels and content for blogs and websites.