Metropolitan News-Enterprise

 

Thursday, July 10, 2003

 

Page 3

 

Former NBC Executive Joins Entertainment Practice at Lord, Bissell & Brook

 

By a MetNews Staff Writer

 

Jody Simon, a veteran entertainment lawyer and onetime NBC Entertainment executive, has joined the entertainment and media practice at Lord, Bissell & Brook.

Simon, who will be based in the firm’s Los Angeles office, previously practiced at Berkowitz & Black in Beverly Hills. He joined Lord Bissell as of counsel last month.

He switched firms, the Long Island, N.Y. native told the MetNews, because Lord Bissell offered “a unique opportunity for me to capitalize on the strength of this firm to build a practice in the transactional entertainment area.”

The entertainment industry has been the focus of his entire professional life, Simon noted, beginning as a trainee at the New York office of the William Morris Agency following graduation from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.

He went to Columbia Law School, he said, with the specific intent to practice entertainment law. While there, he was an editor of both the Columbia Law Review and the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts.

After graduating from Columbia, Simon worked at a pair of New York firms—Philips, Nizer, Benjamin, Krim and Ballon, then Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell and Vassallo. He moved to California in 1989 to work as a business affairs executive at NBC Entertainment for two years before returning to private practice.

Simon is a member of the Executive Committee and Board of Governors of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He often speaks at industry seminars and conferences.

Among the clients he has brought with him to Lord Bissell, he said, are Ty Pennington of the Trading Spaces television program and the executive producers of the shows Paradise Hotel, The Bachelorette, and Pumped!

 

Copyright 2003, Metropolitan News Company