Guild agreements in the entertainment industry are among the most complex labor documents in existence — hundreds of pages of negotiated terms covering wages, residuals, working conditions, jurisdiction, and increasingly, the use of AI and emerging technology. They’re also living documents, updated through negotiations that can shift the landscape significantly from cycle to cycle. The 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA agreements, for example, introduced sweeping new provisions on generative AI that studios and producers are still working to understand and implement.
Van Lier Law’s founder spent over two decades at SAG-AFTRA as Senior Assistant General Counsel for Contracts and Compliance — not advising on guild agreements from the outside, but helping to write, interpret, and enforce them from within. That includes playing a central role in the 2023 negotiations that produced the industry’s first meaningful AI guardrails. The practical knowledge that comes from being in that room is not something that can be replicated from a casebook.
We work with studios, producers, independent production companies, and entertainment businesses navigating the full range of guild compliance questions — from basic production planning to complex disputes, from new media questions to AI provision implementation. If you need someone who understands not just what the agreement says but what it was meant to accomplish and how it’s actually enforced, that’s the practice we’ve built.