Warner Music Group‘s Executive Vice President & General Counsel, Paul Robinson, was honored with the Recording Academy’s Entertainment Law Initiative (ELI) Service Award on Friday (January 30).
He received the award during the organization’s annual ELI Grammy Week luncheon, held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles.
Robinson has served as WMG’s top lawyer since 2006. He was originally set to receive the award last year, but the 2025 ELI event was canceled due to the LA wildfires.
The award was presented by Fred Wistow, WMG’s first General Counsel, who hired Robinson into the company’s in-house legal team back in 1995.
Wistow described Robinson as “a man who cares more and knows more and works more and endures more than anyone else around,” adding: “People are proud to know him. I certainly am.”
He added that Robinson “stands for everything that is honest, diligent, fair.”
Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason jr. also spoke at the event, praising Robinson for his three decades of service at WMG and his efforts to champion fair practices during a period of significant industry transformation.
During his acceptance speech, Robinson reflected on his career at Warner, joking: “Yes, I do sometimes feel like I’ve spent my entire life working at or for Warner. But when I do the math, it’s not my whole life. It’s just a little over a third of a century — a mere 38 years.”
He also shared four principles for lawyers in the music business, including: “Our only agenda should be our client’s agenda,” and: “If humanly and legally possible, our advice must include some kind of ‘yes.'”
The ELI Service Award is presented annually to an attorney who demonstrates a commitment to supporting and advancing the music community.
Robinson thanked his family, colleagues, and mentors throughout his speech.
You can read abridged versions of the speeches from Wistow and Robinson below.
Fred Wistow
Pretty soon, this lunch will be over, and you’ll be free once again to return to the dread of whatever is awaiting you back in your office.
But prior to that reunion, I’m here to introduce the belated recipient of last year’s postponed esteemed Entertainment Law Initiative Service Award, and also the very timely recipient of this year’s Entertainment Law Initiative Service Award. In both cases, Mr. Paul Martin Robinson.
I bet a sizable portion of you assembled here today have had the privilege of working with Paul—sometimes on his Warner side of the table, but mostly on the other, non-Warner side.
And are therefore well aware of the scope and breadth of his many and varied superpowers: his knowledge, his wisdom, his problem-solving mastery — all qualities that can only come from spending basically one’s entire life working in the same company, as if this were the 1950s or something.
And I bet you’d also be familiar with the well-tempered temperament that DNA bestowed on him by his parents, both of whom are astonishingly blessed to be here today — appropriately beaming with pride.
But I’d also bet you may not have ever grasped the scope and breadth of this other, greater superpower — the one that, in my view, approaches the supernatural. And that is his compassion.
My goal, as I strut and fret my hour or so on this stage, will be to paint you a picture that will forever convey this man’s limitless capacity for compassion.
To do that, I must first help you solve two mysteries that are staring you directly in the face. Namely: Who the hell am I? And why did Paul ask me to do this goddamn introduction in the first place?
The answers to both these semi-intriguing questions require a bit of a backstory, so please bear with me just a bit as we travel great distances across time and space to a galaxy far, far away.
Back to those far less instantaneous days of yesteryear. Back to a sort of primitive Jurassic age which, in retrospect, seems marked by a relative simplicity. Before there was streaming or a Spotify or a Zoom or a TikTok.
Before artificial intelligence and its many ills littered our many and omnipresent screens. Before downloads and file sharing and iPhones and iPads and iPods and apps. Back even to a time when you even had to type everything yourself. Back to when even the internet was seen as a kind of benign and dreamy information superhighway, still years away from embarking on its nightmarish and relentless mission to destroy human civilization.
Back then, yes, through some inexplicable fluke that has never been adequately explained, I had become the General Counsel of Warner Music Group — an entity newly hatched as the unholy offspring of Time Inc. and Warner Communications, and whose legal department consisted of merely a tiny handful of bright-eyed attorneys and, can you imagine, not a single paralegal.
Okay, there was one.
The Warner Music Group legal department was then, as it is today, subject to the universal law that governs all departments everywhere. That is, it had to increase overhead. The universal law that applies until the corrective universal law of restructuring eventually kicks in and causes the department to shrink towards downsizing.
At any rate, as a new and law-abiding legal department, we decided to obey the law and grow.
With whom?
From my prestigious perch on a high floor at 75 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, I had come to notice, on a much lower, much less prestigious floor, a young but very strange associate at a law firm doing work for Atlantic Records and some other Warner Music Group divisions.
To be uncharacteristically honest, it was, in fact, impossible not to notice him —because the work that he did was so precociously confident. So much so that the firm’s partners, ever eager to take progressively longer and longer lunch hours, kept throwing at him more and more and more work. All of which he did unbelievably well.
But why do I say strange?
Well, because strangely, for a lawyer in the music business, this guy was also a totally decent human being.
Without the slightest hint of a Sammy Glick-like premature impatience to climb either the legal or corporate ladder. Without any sign of the grasping egomania which, when it infects the ultra-talented, can make those who unfortunately come into contact with it seriously nauseous.
This strange, competent, and decent lawyer’s name was, coincidentally, Paul Martin Robinson.
So, in obedience to the law requiring overhead to increase, we hired him. And over time, he kept getting better and better and better. And lucky for me — because I also like to take longer and longer lunch hours — he did more and more.
And now that we were both on the same prestigious floor, I saw, whenever I came back from one of my progressively longer lunch hours, that in addition to his work ethic and talents, that superpower I referred to earlier — his compassion — was evident in the way he dealt with people. Regardless of whether they were on a Warner or non-Warner side: unusually kind, considerate, thoughtful, fair, and collegial.
Within a few years after Paul’s arrival, I had the great good fortune of successfully engineering my escape, yielding the position of General Counsel to David Johnson, who in yet another few years would in turn yield the throne to Paul.
Now, a generation later — today’s honoree — he continues to hold that role. But the role he fills and the responsibilities he must shoulder in a now vastly different organization and vastly different world—those responsibilities too have become vastly greater.
He has grown from a music-type guy into a music-and-corporate-type guy, ultimately responsible for all the other stuff beyond publishing and recording deals: M&A, trademark, employment, litigation, public policy—the whole nine yards.
And last, but by no means least, he has to deal with the ever-metastasizing growth and intricacies of the digital music world, along with all the governance and securities and compliance issues that beset a public company with subsidiaries all around the world.
It’s a multifaceted role he’s played magnificently now for almost two decades.
Okay. So the answer to “Who am I?” should now be clear: I’m the guy who hired one of the best damn lawyers, entertainment or otherwise, there is.
Once I agreed to do this thing, rather than struggle to find new words when old ones would do, I decided to commit the eighth deadly sin and quote myself. Not only because those words were as true today as they were back when I last introduced him, but because how many goddamn times must I come up with something new to say about this guy?
So I’m going to say them again:
Paul was, and is, and stands for everything that is honest, diligent, fair, self-effacing. A man who is loyal, devoted to his team, who gives credit rather than steals it. A man who cares more, knows more, works more, and endures more than anyone else around. A gentleman in an age when civility within the public sphere seems to have become an obsolete form of behavior.
It is remarkable that this mild-mannered, utterly reasonable, insanely knowledgeable man — this paradigm of talent and integrity—is all that. And on top of all that: well-read, funny, literate, a lover of music, a singer himself, boundlessly devoted to his wife and two kids, and also a brilliant but humble and decent man.
As you’ve come to see, with my help: compassionate.
God, even the inevitable whining and groaning that every lawyer learns to master in law school — he does in a way that doesn’t make you cringe.
People are proud to know him. I certainly am. A man I would call a friend.
If it hasn’t yet become apparent, let me be clear: I love this guy. He’s special and one of a kind.
And Paul—when you inevitably get the next award, please call up one of those other guys and give them a shot.
Ladies and gentlemen, at long last: the recipient of this year’s Entertainment Law Initiative Service Award — Paul Martin Robinson.
Paul Robinson:
As off the wall as this may seem, I often think of myself the way one of my cinematic heroes, Jerry Maguire, described himself: ‘I’m the guy you don’t usually see. I’m the guy behind the scenes’.
For more than a decade now that I’ve been attending this event, I’ve sat at tables with friends and colleagues, and yet I honestly never pictured me being the recipient.
Thank you to Harvey and the Recording Academy ELI for this incredible honor, and my thanks to Fred for introducing me.
I’d also like to express my gratitude to some of the other people responsible for my winding up on this stage today.
In 1988—yes, 1988—I started working with Mike Mayer and Martin Katz. Their firm, Mayer, Katz, Baker, Leibowitz & Roberts, were the early music business lawyers, and their biggest client was Warner Music Group.
Time now for another confession: Yes, I do sometimes feel like I’ve spent my entire life working at or for Warner. But when I do the math, it’s not my whole life. It’s just a little over a third of a century —a mere 38 years.
It wasn’t until 1995 that the guy who just introduced me hired me to join Warner’s in-house corporate legal team.
And then 11 years after that, about 20 years ago, CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. gave me the General Counsel role. Thank you, Edgar, for making me only the third General Counsel in Warner’s history.
For archivists in the room: after Fred, there was Dave Johnson, and then there was me. I’m deeply indebted to both my predecessors for their mentorship. I’m kind of a mash-up of David and Fred, only with considerably more hair.
At Warner, we have a long and storied tradition of partnering with artists and songwriters. My thanks to our CEO, Robert Kyncl, and our entire executive leadership team, and to Access Industries and our board of directors for keeping that proud tradition alive. And additional thanks for not yet appointing Warner’s fourth General Counsel.
Julie Swidler [Executive Vice President, Business Affairs and General Counsel for Sony Music Entertainment] and Jeff Harleston [General Counsel and Executive Vice President of Business & Legal Affairs for Universal Music Group], fellow ELI Service Award winners—thank you.
It’s been a pleasure to collaborate with you on public policy and litigation issues and resolve conflicts when our companies have been at odds, all without ever running afoul of the antitrust laws. So far.
As Julie and Jeff can tell you, General Counsels in the music industry are jacks and jills of all trades and masters of none. Luckily for me, Warner’s team of lawyers all around the world are the masters who always make me look good. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to each and every one of them.
Okay, now what?
Well, I thought I’d take this extraordinary moment to try and say something profound yet not too long. Something for those of you who are in the early stages of your careers, and a general reminder for the rest of us who have already racked up an ample number of years—or who are, like me, eons into this profession.
So here goes.
I came across an article in The Economist titled “Why Everyone Should Think Like a Lawyer.” The premise: legal training makes great executives because it teaches a full range of essential skills—discipline, preparation, exercising judgment, inferring rules from patterns, anticipating what might happen next, accepting ambiguity, and being ready to question almost everything. It’s a thorough list, and all of it true.
However, the article had a subtitle: “The Unloved Profession Has a Lot to Teach Managers.” And its first sentence read: “Lawyers are often seen as the most tedious of professionals.”
Unloved? Tedious? Mwah? You?
Yes, we can be tedious, and yes, we are often unloved. And yes, I’ve definitely felt those sentiments directed at me throughout my career—but no more than maybe 80, 90% of the time.
This less-than-endearing view of lawyers creates an atmosphere in which doing our jobs—that is, achieving the best outcomes for our clients—becomes more difficult. So how do we combat these stereotypes? How do we make ourselves less tedious and more lovable?
As much as we need to be experts in the law, we also need to be experts in how we provide our counsel and how we present ourselves to the world—both of which are as critical to being a lawyer as the quality of the advice we give.
Here are four hard-learned principles, which are at least simple, and again, not too long:
Rule Number One: It’s not about you.
Our only agenda should be our client’s agenda. We need to detach our egos from the process. As Michael Corleone said, “It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.” Lawyers who make things personal help no one and hurt the relationships that are at the very foundation of what we do. Yes, be a zealous advocate, but don’t lose yourself in the zeal. Remember whom you’re advocating for: your client, not you.
Second rule, in the immortal words of REO Speedwagon: Roll with the changes.
The music business has experienced massive amounts of tech disruption: LPs, cassettes, CDs, LPs again, file sharing, downloads, streaming, and of course, AI. What you’re hearing now may, in fact, be the last ELI acceptance speech not written by ChatGPT. Well, not entirely.
And right along with the rest of the world, our work environments have become highly unpredictable. During my time at Warner, we’ve had seven CEOs and three owners. We’ve gone private and then public—twice.
Lawyers can be resistant to change. We tend to cling to our legal and other precedents as our businesses and workplaces rapidly evolve around us. We can’t be standing still. We need to ceaselessly adapt and lean into the future.
Third rule: Communicate simply and concisely.
Stephen King said, “To write is human, to edit is divine.” And he wasn’t just talking about horror novels. When it comes to drafting a contract, a brief, or even an email, less is always more. Litigators may be constrained by word or page counts, but the rest of us are woefully unconstrained by document length, so we need to constrain ourselves.
As for me, I’m relentless when it comes to editing myself, and to the horror of my team, an equally savage editor of others. It’s no accident that my office features this New Yorker cartoon with the caption: “I have just a few minor fixes that will ruin everything you’ve come up with.”
In truth, though, I don’t edit to ruin, but to enhance. Words are the tools of our trade. Remember to treat them as the precious commodities they are. Use fewer.
Fourth and last: Bring positivity to solving problems.
I know, I know — we’re professional skeptics. It’s who we are. Our favorite question is “What if?” But seeing demons lurking around every corner is unhelpful to clients and uninspiring to our teams.
We don’t need to be clueless Pollyannas, but if humanly and legally possible, our advice must include some kind of “yes.” Again, we need to keep in front of mind our clients’ goals and focus on how to achieve them by offering pragmatic, useful, and business-oriented advice.
These four principles—they may sound easy to follow. They’re not. I call them hard-learned because here’s another confession: I’ve managed to violate every single one of them. But as best I can, I forgive myself and try to learn from my mistakes and help my team do the same.
Let’s face it: we are so fortunate doing what we do. We have genuinely inspiring and enviable jobs in the service of artists and songwriters and their music.
Excellence in our profession is what ELI stands for. All of us in this room are standard-bearers. Every matter we handle gives us an opportunity to model behavior that can dispel those preconceived notions about lawyers. Let’s act on those opportunities.
Not only will we be more fulfilled, but our clients might start seeing us as a tad less tedious and a tiny bit more lovable.
Music Business Worldwide