Frederick U. Fierst
entertainment - intellectual property - corporate
Fred has been a lawyer for over 45 years in connection with television, feature films, licensing and merchandising and interactive media. He practiced corporate and entertainment law in New York City for several years before moving to Northampton in 1980 and establishing the firm. During the 1980s Fred enjoyed a general practice which included everything from sophisticated corporate transactions to murder cases, torts, and divorces. Since the late 1980s, Fred's practice has been concentrated in representing clients in the entertainment and licensing industries within which he has developed an international reputation and clientele, particularly in connection with children’s programming, software, and interactive media.
Fred was recently featured in the cover story of Super Lawyers Magazine. A link to the digital edition can be found here.
For more than thirty years, I have concentrated my practice in the representation of creative individuals and their businesses. Before that, I was involved in the general practice of law, focusing on business and trial work, and for a few years early in my career while practicing law in New York, in the music business.
After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1976, I took a job with a small corporate litigation firm on Wall Street. I found legal work fascinating, and I relished the opportunity to learn the basic skills of corporate and litigation practice, particularly the drafting of pleadings. One of our clients was CBS Records, and my work on its behalf led to my accepting a position as junior partner in one of the preeminent entertainment litigation firms in the country. I shortly thereafter found myself traveling around the world helping to solve problems for some of the leading entertainers of the time, including the Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, and Pink Floyd. During these years I also developed a comfort and enjoyment with being in court.
Despite the excitement of my work life in New York, and the many other attractions of the city, once I turned thirty, I began to feel ready to start a family. I wanted to find a place to live where I could raise children in fresh air, surrounded by green grass and plenty of trees. I had attended college in Massachusetts and particularly loved the Western, less populated, part of the State, particularly the Connecticut River Valley which I had first explored in my carpenter days between college and law school when I was hired to build the faculty day care center at the newly opened Hampshire College. But before settling down I first I wanted to do a bit more adventuring, as I had when I spent a year traveling around Europe, Israel and North Africa just after college. So I left New York in March of 1979 to explore South America, and spent 14 months on a fabulous trip traveling overland to Tierra Del Fuego and back. I met my wife Eva in Macchu Picchu to which she was on a backpacking vacation from her home in Cologne, Germany where she co-owned the elegant and hip Café Piaf. Eva and I adventured together in the Amazon basin and up and down Peru, and then after she returned to Germany to sell her café we met up in the US and settled in Northampton during the summer of 1980.
I obtained a job teaching litigation theory at Western New England Law School and hung up a shingle shortly thereafter. I was surprised and pleased at how many of my former New York clients asked me to continue working for them from Northampton, and I was soon going back and forth from Northampton to New York City and maintaining a bi-city practice. Within a few months of opening my solo practice I ran into an old college acquaintance, Ken Neiman, who had been working in the legal services field after graduating from Harvard Law School and was ready to venture into the private practice of law. We formed Fierst and Neiman in October of 1981, sharing the one room office on Main Street right across from the courthouse which I had rented some months earlier. When Ken or I had a client in the office, the other of us would go across the street to work in the law library at the courthouse. We keep a client list and I remember the great day when it ran onto its second page!
Our commitment from the get-go was to deliver to our clients the same quality of service as could be obtained at the major urban law firms, but at a lesser cost and with more personal attention. Even in our early years, when the fees we were collecting were minimal, we were determined to hire the best staff we could find and to provide them with the best in equipment with which to work do their jobs. We were very excited when we bought the first Lanier word processor in Northampton and began to use it.
Fierst and Neiman was a full service law firm which, over the following fourteen years, developed a strong statewide reputation and practice in civil and criminal trials, family law, corporate transactions, torts, commercial and residential real estate, trusts and estates, bankruptcy, social security and labor law. During those years, I was responsible for heading our business and litigation practices. All of this began to change in the late 1980s when the creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles who had just opened their Mirage Studios came knocking on my door. They had just begun to launch their intellectual property and were aware that I had prior experience as a New York entertainment lawyer. I spent most of the next five years traveling the world and helping to launch and run Mirage Studios and its worldwide TMNT business while Ken ran our local practice.
Although the TMNT kept me plenty busy, in 1993 I decided to take on other entertainment clients from around the world. While it seemed an improbable practice to launch from small, out of the way Northampton, it’s worked fabulously, and I’ve had the pleasure of helping some wonderfully creative people from all over the world develop and prosper from the intellectual properties they have created.
When Ken was appointed as the Magistrate Judge in the local Federal Court in 1994, the Chief of the local U.S. Attorney’s Office, John Pucci, joined the firm, and we took on the new name of Fierst & Pucci LLP. Over the next few years, as we added lawyers and built up a regional and international clientele, we decided to drop many of the general practice areas for which Fierst and Neiman had become known, and instead to concentrate in the areas of the law in which either John or I had both expertise and interest. For me, that meant focusing on entertainment and licensing law, corporate and business matters and intellectual property. For John, it meant focusing on complex civil and criminal litigation, as well as employment and health care law. We soon needed help in the litigation practice and brought in Jeff Kinder, who had succeeded John Pucci as Chief of the Western Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office as our new partner. Jeff spent seven great years with us before he left upon his appointment to a Massachusetts Superior Court judgeship from which he has now been elevated to an Appeals Court judgeship.
Jonathan Kane joined us in 2001 after ten years of private practice with large firms in Boston, Springfield and Hartford and a foray into the high-tech world as COO and general counsel of an internet-based software start-up company. Jon became our partner in 2005. With Jon, we added an experienced negotiator with a strong background in corporate and transactional work. He then developed an expertise and broad clientele in housing law, leading to his developing the most successful Housing Court practice in Western Massachusetts, as well as becoming one of the top business lawyers in the Pioneer Valley. Jon left the firm in June 2019, when he was sworn in as a Housing Court judge and subsequently as Chief Judge of the Western Massachusetts Housing Court.
My now-partner in the entertainment and intellectual property section of our practice, Hun Ohm, wanted to return to the Connecticut River Valley area that he had grown to love when he attended Amherst College before he went back to his home state to attend the University of Michigan Law School. Hun joined us in 2006 after several years’ experience working on intellectual property matters with a major New York law firm and a branding corporation. Once we started working together, I saw how brilliant, talented, and ethical he is at negotiating and drafting complex documents as well as handling our clients’ trademark portfolios.
After seventeen years at the firm, John Pucci left the firm at year end in 2011 to relocate his practice to a law firm in another city.
Hun Ohm became a partner on April 1, 2012 at the same time as David C. Bloomberg joined the firm as a partner. David is a local boy who attended Northampton High School before going off to study at Yale and then the University of Connecticut Law School. David has spent over thirty years practicing banking and real estate law, and certainly has one of the most active and likely the most prestigious real estate law practices in the area. He is a wonderful man and lawyer, and my co-managing partner at the firm.
In 2014, we added two outstanding, mature, experienced, and very competent lawyers to our team. Susan Cooper is a graduate of Cornell and of the George Washington Law Center. She has worked for large firms in New York City and Springfield as well as in house for the corporate department at CIGNA Corporation in Connecticut. Susan took some years off to raise her children and fortuitously for us she was ready to go back to work just as we were looking for help with our international business and regional commercial real estate and corporate practices. It has been a pleasure to have her join us.
Nicholas Grimaldi attended the University of Wisconsin and Boston University School of Law. He has practiced banking, corporate, bankruptcy, real estate, and civil litigation law for over twenty years in Providence, Boston and Springfield. We met Nick when he worked opposite several of our lawyers in some local litigation, real estate, and Merger and Acquisition deals and we were very impressed by his manner and his work. When we needed to expand in those areas, we asked Nick to join us and he accepted our offer. He is an outstanding, level-headed lawyer with an amazing work ethic. Since joining us, his real estate work has exploded, and he is focusing on that and his corporate and transactional work.
I am very excited that my son Daniel L. Fierst became an associate with the firm as of August 2015. Dan left Northampton to attend college at the University of Colorado. Following graduation, he worked for one of our favorite clients, Paradox Entertainment, Inc. (now Cabinet Licensing) in the entertainment and licensing industries in Beverly Hills, California for several years before deciding to return to Massachusetts to attend the University of Massachusetts Law School. After graduating with a solid academic record from UMass Law, Dan became a staff attorney for the worldwide entertainment powerhouse Wargaming.net, in their Austin, Texas offices. Dan has been working with me and Hun Ohm in the firm’s entertainment practice. Watching a young man of his talent grow into a solid practical and integral lawyer has been doubly pleasing because he is both protégé, and son.
Once we knew Jon Kane was going to be appointed Judge of the Housing Court, we looked around for a lawyer who we could bring in to take over his booming Housing Court practice. Jon had worked with Peter Lane and recommended that we interview him. Peter was also a local boy who had gone to New York to attend Fordham College after which he spent many years working for New York City’s Legal Aid society while attending Brooklyn College Law School at night. Peter has concentrated his practice in consumer protection, civil rights cases, and poverty law. While he is now representing many landlords, I know that it is with a sensitivity and heart full of love that he helps them work out their issues with their tenants.
Like many of the other attorneys in the firm, we first met our newest lawyer Mae Stiles when she appeared against one of us in a matter. We were very impressed by this bright, tough and self-confident young woman who knew her stuff and would not be pushed around. We learned that Mae had also grown up in the area before leaving to attend the University of Vermont following which she spent some time surfing in Southern California. She left that world to attend the University of Pennsylvania Law School from where she worked for a large firm in New York and then became a partner in a boutique litigation practice in San Francisco where she specialized in intellectual property litigation. We offered her an of-counsel position at the firm and she immediately accepted. My God what a great job Mae has done working shoulder to shoulder with me and taking the lead with our litigation practice since she has joined us.
Through all these years of growth and change, I, and the firm I founded over 40 years ago, have kept the same basic goals of delivering first quality services at reasonable prices while serving and defending our clients’ needs with integrity and compassion.