John Branca’s contracts raised the bar.
There aren’t many lawyers in the entertainment industry as famous as their celebrity clients, but John Branca is one of them.
Branca is co-executor of the Michael Jackson estate and represented Jackson off and on from 1980 until Jackson’s unexpected death in 2009 while also brokering historic deals for the likes of Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Dr. Dre, The Eagles, Motown Records founder Berry Gordy and others. These deals not only helped the individual artists or acts achieve record earnings, keep rights in their songwriting catalogs and generally protect their creative legacies, but, in many cases, also set precedents that fundamentally changed the nature of the music industry going forward.