Lawyer-Agent

Excerpt from an article (by Stephen Galloway) on the transition of lawyers into the film agency business:

"A lot of people in law school tend to be a bit detached, and that doesn't necessarily serve a talent agent very well," Giordano acknowledges. "As an agent, you have to be there for your clients at all times and you have to be supportive, and a legal background doesn't teach you that."

Tenzer goes further, saying that being an attorney can bring its own negative baggage.

"The legal training will never be a disadvantage," he says. "But one of the things people need to look to when they are making that transition is to try to sound like an agent and not like a lawyer because that can be a little off-putting. Occasionally, you see people with a legal background focusing on legal issues when they should be dealing with marketing or creative issues."

In other ways, the former lawyers admit, there is an inherent disparity between lawyering and agenting.

"The movie business doesn't always lend itself neatly to a tidy, analytic framework," Barber says. "There is an instinctive part, a psychological part, a creative part -- and those three are often at odds with the way you are trained to think and function as a lawyer, where you learn to get rid of the psychological, get rid of the instinctive and get rid of the creative."