Anthony Lupo, chairman of ArentFox Schiff, spoke with Dana Walters, associate editor of The Practice, to talk about the rise of fashion law and what it says about law firm organization and market strategy.
Dana Walters: Can you tell us about your journey into the legal profession and what attracted you to specialize in fashion law?
Anthony Lupo: I always tell young lawyers it’s important to figure out what you like and that you would do for free. If you chase the money, you’re not going to be happy at the end of the day. You need to find something that’ll be a career of 30 years where you’re doing the type of stuff that really clicks with you. Being Italian, fashion is one of the things that connects with me. But I got there in a roundabout way.
I started doing internet law at a time when the internet was popping, but no one had taken it up as a practice area yet. I was a young associate, and I was suddenly being interviewed by CNN and Johnny Cochran and getting a lot of media attention. I started to get picked up by some big companies at the time. When the owner of Diesel jeans was asking for a lawyer, Steve Jobs at Apple recommended me. That ended up being my entry into the Italian fashion scene. I was able to parlay that into working with a bunch of different fashion companies. A lot of CEOs of Italian and French fashion companies leave after two years. The CEOs would go from company to company to company, and I had befriended them and they liked my style, so I was able to keep the existing company and go with them to the new company. Then, in a relatively short period of time, I was working for half the industry.
I always tell young lawyers it’s important to figure out what you like and that you would do for free.
Anthony Lupo, chairman, ArentFox Schiff
Walters: Jumping forward many years, you’re now the “the father of fashion law.” I’d love to hear a little bit about the rise of the practice area and any challenges associated with institutionalizing it.
Lupo: There are very few firms that really practice fashion law. There are a number of firms that do trademarks for fashion clients, but they’re not fashion law firms. What we’ve became is more of a consigliere for fashion and retail. Everything from a lease to HR to enforcement of a trademark to the CEO’s daughter who gets arrested for sneaking into a bar, we handle it. Whatever that CEO needs, whatever the board needs, we do it. That’s the type of practice I enjoy, where you’re doing a lot of counseling and a lot of strategy.
To do fashion law, you have to understand what’s happening in the industry and the business of fashion. For instance, why did one brand open a lease there and not here? I did an interview with the CEO of Lacoste once, and he said, “I don’t want to be near a bank,” which was shocking to me. He said, “I want to be near an Apple store.” You start to hear the strategies of how brands position themselves. You learn what materials they’re using and where it’s coming from and why that matters. You learn where people are, where things are being sourced and how they’re being made, all the way through to how they’re getting into the United States and the tax implications of that and everything else. It’s really a general-counsel-type practice in some ways. We ended up pretty quickly and organically having a large segment of fashion clientele: from YSL to Gucci to Versace to Balenciaga to hundreds more.
As ArentFox started to gain more clients, we created an industry group. We saw that we had different pieces of the industry, but distributed across the firm. We had somebody doing real estate for fashion clients and somebody doing import export, but they weren’t talking to each other. So we created an industry group around fashion to teach each other.
Walters: This issue of The Practice investigates niche specialties of law. What lessons might lawyers interested in niche practice areas draw from the establishment of fashion law as an industry group and your journey through it?
Lupo: We’re at a weird moment in time with law firms. Some law firms are only looking for the “bet the company” type of work, and it’s going to be driven by billing rate where everything is $1,500 an hour. Doing this type of work, you might get a transaction or large-scale litigation, but you’re not going to get a 360 practice. It’s more of the middle-market firms—the AmLaw 50 to 120—that are going to have the ability to innovate and establish niche practice areas. At the same time, however, the firm has to be large enough to be able to support that practice. And then the hardest part is they have to have done enough work that they can actually bring a value add to their clients. You have to put time in on your own, not just billing a client. You have to pay attention to the industry. For instance, if you’re a labor and employment attorney (L&E) in fashion, you have to follow every lawsuit even if you are not directly involved.
We had a case where one of my clients had made-in-USA shirts and they got sued for having buttons on the shirt because the buttons weren’t made in the United States. And the United States has a law that says items have to be substantially made in the United States to say “Made in the U.S.A,” which it was. It was only the buttons, but California being California had a wacky provision that wasn’t clear.
Knowing that, being in touch with that as a labor and employment lawyer, you start to see what’s happening. You have to monitor all the fashion companies to see what retail is saying.
If you have it created by the AI, you don’t own the copyright, and that means anybody can take it. You have to think that through.
Walters: What is interesting and challenging about practicing fashion and retail law right now? How are changes, for instance, ESG or AI, impacting your practice?
Lupo: AI is going to be existential. And people in law school right now better get up to speed, or it’s going to eat their jobs. I was in Milan recently with a footwear company and the owner has 30 designers under him designing footwear, and it would usually take him five months to get to prototype. He uploaded the 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 footwear designs to ChatGPT to predict what 2024 is going to look like, and it came out with 50 designs. He then went back and told it the color scheme he wanted—reds and greens—and asked for larger soles and other things like that. He got about 25 designs in about a half an hour time, which he said would’ve taken him four months. Is he going to need 30 designers anymore? No, he won’t. The ones that are really comfortable with this and can adapt to the new paradigm are going to be the ones to succeed.
We’re helping a lot of companies figure this out.
There are complications to it, too. If you have it created by the AI, you don’t own the copyright, and that means anybody can take it. You have to think that through.
We’re also seeing it in logistics. One of the interesting examples is you would have people with institutional knowledge say, Red dresses sell better in LA and black dresses sell better in New York. They would fabricate a larger number of them for New York. Now, AI is going to be able to say in real time exactly how it’s selling. And not just you, but all your competitors. Anything that’s on the web, they’re going to be able to comb. You could have had a person do this, check all the inventory of your competitors on the web, see how many dresses are left in that color before you ship to see what’s happening in real time, especially if you’re doing bespoke. But AI is going to be able to change that in a minute.
We go to market based on industry, not practice.
Walters: It seems like probably you’re well poised to attack those problems, given where you started.
Lupo: It’s where our firm’s DNA is too. We’re very comfortable in the gray, and our lawyers are trained to be in the gray at our firm. I put a lot of our lawyers in-house for a period of time. If you work at the firm, we like for you to go work at a client to learn the business of the client. They then come out and they’ve learned the industry. We placed people in Meta at the time it was building its AI group, and they come back and they’re also trained in the business. We’ve done this with a lot of fashion clients.
Walters: How do you think about adding new practice areas and supporting them from the niche to the mainstream? How are you thinking about the growth of the firm in terms of market and client demand?
Lupo: We go to market different than a lot of other firms. That is, we go to market based on industry, not practice. That means I have to have somebody that does 360 in those industries. I can’t just go and say, “We do fashion law and oh, we can do some trademark work too, and if you need help with real estate, I can bring my real estate guy in and he can learn it on your dime.” It really means that you have to have a critical mass—at least at our firm—in three different practices.
To give you an example, when the beverage practice started, I had a guy in San Francisco that was doing class action. I had a guy in DC that was selling a winery—doing M&A. I had another corporate lawyer that was doing corporate work for a lot of international wine distributors. I had a guy in DC that was doing regulatory work with caffeinated drinks and dealing with the FDA. And I had the former general counsel of Moët Hennessy. These guys were not talking to each other. All I said was, “We are going to have meetings. We’re going to learn what each other does so we can pitch each other’s work”—and we filled in the blanks. We filled in labor and employment, trade, IP, and so on. Suddenly, you realize we have one of the largest beverage practices in the United States.
You could be practicing in a trade, you could be IP, you could be L&E, you could be FDA, but if you want to work in retail or fashion, we’re the shop for you.
That’s when we started to do this with every group from an industry. Where I focus, I look to hire in practices and industries. We hired a pretty established trade lawyer in New York not too long ago, and we have one of the largest trade practices in the United States. But what made her appealing was that she had a bunch of retail clients. I knew that if I brought her in, we could add 25 percent to her book without doing anything.
This makes it easier to hire, too. They know you’re the place to come. You could be practicing in a trade, you could be IP, you could be L&E, you could be FDA, but if you want to work in retail or fashion, we’re the shop for you. That’s what we’ve done with a bunch of different industry areas.
Walters: What advice do you have for students who might want to go into fashion law or retail, but also a practice area that maybe feels a little niche or not established yet?
Lupo: That’s where opportunity exists. Your students coming out knowing AI, who are they competing against? Somebody that’s known it for maybe two to three more years longer than them. They come out wanting to do tax, and you got dinosaurs that have been practicing this for centuries and you’re competing against big names. That’s what happened with me when I got out of school. Nobody knew what the hell internet law was, and I owned it. I did telemedicine, I did distance education—I did anything that touched the internet. I was trained as an IP lawyer. But I branched out and branded myself as an internet lawyer, and there was no one doing it. I was able to really cash in on that.
I’m also a big believer in paying attention to the universe and the opportunities that are given. And if they are coming in areas that you’re into—fashion, entertainment, whatever, that thing that really makes you tick—boy, you jump on that and you don’t look at how profitable it is. You look at, Is this going to be rewarding to me?
Walters: That’s super valuable and very important advice beyond the law. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Anthony Lupo is the chairman of ArentFox Schiff and practices primarily in the entertainment, fashion, and technology industries.
