The entertainment business has spent decades treating legal as the department that arrives late, reads the deal after the handshake, and says “no.” That sequencing made a kind of sense when a hit show lived in one territory, on one screen, under one licensing model. It makes no sense now. A character born in a writers’ room in Los Angeles can be a plush toy in Seoul, a mobile game in São Paulo, and a sponsorship asset across three sports federations inside 18 months, and every one of those moves either rests on rights secured early or collapses because they were not. Peter Steckelman, a chief business and legal officer whose career spans Tennis Channel, Warner Bros., Mattel, and Konami, argues that the legal function is not the brake on that expansion. Handled properly, it is the engine.
File Before The World Finds You
Steckelman’s first principle sounds administrative until the consequences land. “The moment your idea shows promise, secure your trademarks in every market you plan to enter,” he says. The reason is structural, not cautious. “Many countries award rights to whoever files first, so file early.” First-to-file regimes do not care who invented the character, who funded the pilot, or who the audience associates with the name. They care about the date stamped on the application. A company that waits for commercial proof before spending on registrations is effectively running an open auction, and the bidders are trademark squatters who read trade press for a living.
What makes this more than a compliance checklist is the time horizon Steckelman attaches to it. “[File] broadly and plan for where your audience will be in five years, as well as where it is today,” he says. That instruction forces a conversation most entertainment companies defer indefinitely: where, specifically, is this brand going, and in what categories? Answering it at the filing stage costs money before revenue exists, which is exactly why it gets skipped. The alternative is discovering, at the moment a distribution partner finally wants a territory, that the name belongs to someone else there and the deal now carries a seven-figure settlement attached to it. “Strong intellectual property (IP) ownership is the foundation everything else is built on,” Steckelman says, and the sequencing matters more than the sentiment. Everything downstream – the licensing, the partnerships, the merchandise – is a lease written against an asset. If the asset is not owned cleanly, the leases are worthless.
Licensing That Expands Without Diluting
Growth in entertainment often arrives through other people’s factories, studios, and shelf space. “Licensing is how a brand moves from the screen to toys, games, and even into new territories,” Steckelman says. The tension is obvious and rarely resolved well. Every licensee is a partner and a risk at the same time, because each one puts the brand in front of consumers without the brand owner in the room. Scale through licensing is also dilution through licensing unless the agreement does real work.
Steckelman is specific about what that work looks like. “The smartest agreements set clear quality standards, approval rights and territory boundaries,” he says. Those three terms are normally treated as boilerplate and negotiated down under deadline pressure, which is a mistake with compounding costs. Approval rights are the mechanism by which a brand owner retains editorial judgment over products it did not design. Territory boundaries prevent the channel conflict that turns two good partners into one lawsuit. Quality standards are the provisions that determine whether a fan in an unexplored market encounters a recognizable version of the brand. Steckelman frames the goal in terms of what the audience experiences rather than what the contract protects: “Every partner extends your brand in a way that feels true to it, and fans get a consistent experience wherever they meet it.” Consistency across markets is not an aesthetic preference. It is the thing that makes the brand worth licensing in the next territory, and the asset that erodes fastest when nobody is enforcing the terms.
Legal In The Room From Day One
The structural argument Steckelman makes is about where legal counsel sits in the calendar. “The best results come when legal counsel works side by side with creative and business teams from the moment of ideation,” he says. Most organizations do the opposite. Creative develops, business models, and legal papers the outcome, which guarantees that the legal contribution is limited to reducing damage rather than shaping the opportunity. By the time the contract arrives, the commercial architecture is fixed and the only available moves are defensive.
Move counsel forward in the process and the function changes character entirely. “Legal can spot commercial opportunities, guide expansion into new markets, and structure deals with colleagues that open doors,” Steckelman says. That is a different job description from the one most entertainment executives have in mind, and it requires lawyers who understand distribution economics and sponsorship markets as well as they understand rights language. It also requires business leaders willing to hand over a seat at the strategy table, rather than a position at the end of the workflow. The payoff Steckelman describes is confidence: “When legal helps shape the strategy from the beginning, the brand grows with confidence.” Confidence, in this context, is practical. It means a company can say “yes” to a new market quickly because it already owns the marks there, and can sign a licensee in a week because it knows what terms it will not give up. Speed in entertainment is a competitive advantage, and the companies that move fastest are not the ones with the loosest legal process. They are the ones that did the work early enough that the questions were already answered.
His summary of the approach is three moves, in order: “Protect your brand early, partner with purpose, and make legal a true driver of growth.”
Follow Peter Steckelman on LinkedIn for more insights on brand protection, licensing strategy, and legal leadership in sports, entertainment, and digital media.
