Century City Lawyer Morphs Into New Position

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After spending more than three years as the chair of the trademark practice group at Century City-based Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger LLP, Rami Yanni has moved in-house as the senior vice president of business and legal affairs at Saban Brands LLC.

Saban Brands, a Century City company founded in May by local billionaire Haim Saban, is dedicated to acquiring entertainment and consumer brands. It already acquired the Power Rangers franchise from Walt Disney Co.

Yanni will be the legal point man for the company, and help oversee acquisitions and licensing.

“It’s a very compelling opportunity – the ability to join this group sort of on the ground floor that’s going to relaunch the Power Rangers franchise and hopefully acquire other branded properties,” he said. “The ability to be part of the senior management team and be able to really participate in providing strategic guidance to a brand-driven company that is based on acquiring and managing licenses and brands. That’s my key skill set in terms of what I’ve done in my legal career.”

Yanni, 47, has been practicing for 17 years, most of that as an intellectual property attorney. Before Greenberg Glusker, he worked in the L.A. offices of McDermott Will & Emery LLP and Squire Sanders & Dempsey LLP.

In the past, he has negotiated license agreements and acquisitions or sales of trademarks, and has represented clients in trademark protection.

Elie Dekel, chief executive of Saban Brands, said Yanni had “vast experience and knowledge in intellectual property and licensing” and was joining the firm’s core leadership team.

Yanni started at Saban Brands on June 1, and has already begun work on the Power Rangers, which has trademarks registered in over 75 countries. Yanni will help manage hundreds of those licenses worldwide.

“This is an exciting move for me, my foray into corporate life,” he said.

Game Change

Eleven years ago, Patrick Sweeney was doing television syndication deals for Paramount Pictures when he saw an opening listed in a local newspaper for an in-house attorney at video game company Vivendi Games. He answered it, got the job and switched the trajectory of his legal career.

“I knew nothing about the games business, and it happened to be better than what I had at the time,” said Sweeney, 41. “There really weren’t a lot of people who were focused on this industry back then from a legal perspective. I was one of the earlier game industry folks.”

Since then, Sweeney has worked at video game publisher Brash Entertainment and specialized in video game transactions at Nixon Peabody LLP and Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP. He recently joined the Century City office of Reed Smith LLP, where he will continue to focus on the industry as counsel.

Sweeney said he plans to bring all his clients, including major publisher Namco Bandai and developer Gas Powered Games, to Reed Smith.

Sweeney will fit well with Reed Smith entertainment attorneys Michael S. Sherman and Stephen E. Sessa, said Stuart Shanus, managing partner for the Century City office.

“The three of them together make a nice team,” Shanus said. “You’re starting to see more convergence in those areas as video game manufacturers start to incorporate, say, music into their offerings, either their own music or licensing other people’s music.”

Sweeney said he has helped his clients with transactions that have resulted in about 150 games being released over the past decade. Not only has the video game industry grown, he added, but the complexity of developing games has affected the types of transactions that happen.

“You’ve seen more of what I call sort of a fragmented development of games – more outsourcing, more technology licensing, more of a collaborative development process than there traditionally was,” he said. “Eight or 10 years ago, you would hire one company and they’d do everything.”

If Sweeney wasn’t much of a gamer to begin with, these days he spends “as much time as I can” playing games. That usually amounts to five to 10 hours a week. He expressed a fondness for Activision/Blizzard’s “Call of Duty” franchise, but declined to name his console of choice.

“I’m not allowed to,” he said with a laugh. “It’s not in my best interest to be partial.”

Staff reporter Alfred Lee can be reached at [email protected] or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 221.

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