Practice Areas & Industries: Holme Roberts & Owen LLP

Practice/Industry Group Overview

Holme Roberts & Owen LLP has an interdisciplinary group of lawyers with experience assisting publishers and disseminators of print, broadcast, and online content in their efforts to obtain and disseminate information. With several former journalists among our lawyers, we bring our knowledge and appreciation for the media industry to bear in providing thoughtful advice and representation on a variety of problems facing those who gather and disseminate information. In addition, our lawyers are experienced in copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property matters, enabling us to provide our clients with thorough guidance on a full range of content-related issues.

Services Available

Counseling

We emphasize prepublication and prebroadcast review of content. Our lawyers are available 24/7 to review print, broadcast, and online content. With experience litigating matters involving libel, privacy, copyright, trademark, and other content-related issues, our lawyers can spot problems and provide advice that helps our clients either avoid litigation altogether or set the stage for its early dismissal.

The emergence of the Internet has brought with it a wide range of legal issues of critical importance to new media clients. We assist clients with the creation of websites, the registration and protection of domain names and other intellectual property, the implementation of web site privacy policies and terms of use, review of online content and advertising, advice on laws pertaining to email, and the development and utilization of software and digital technology. We are experienced in matters involving Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and other legislation pertaining to the online communications and content.

Access to Information

Publishers often cannot achieve their goals unless they have access to information. However, gathering information carries its own risks. We provide counsel on strategies for news gathering, and we are experienced in dealing with such issues as wiretapping, trespass, anti-paparazzi statutes, and invasion of privacy.

Our lawyers have extensive experience in helping clients obtain access to government information. We help open court proceedings and unseal court documents, and unlock doors to information held by governmental agencies, providing advice and representation in litigation involving state open records and open meetings laws and the federal Freedom of Information Act.

In today’s world, it is not only the news media who have a need for information maintained by the government. As information held by government entities becomes increasingly digitized and sophisticated, our expertise can help non-media clients obtain access to information that is held by federal, state, or local government agencies without paying excessive fees or agreeing to restrictions on the use of the information.

Litigation

In matters where litigation cannot be avoided, we work toward an expeditious resolution for our clients. To avoid protracted litigation, we seek dismissal on early motions, such as motions to strike under state anti-SLAPP statutes. We have obtained pretrial dismissals for numerous publisher clients, in connection with defamation, privacy and related claims, including major news, book, news magazine, and Internet publishers.

Our media lawyers are also experienced in litigating copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property matters, enabling them to provide effective and efficient representation in lawsuits involving any combination of content issues. In addition, our firm has experience in the law of cyber defamation and in intellectual property law as applied to the Internet, having represented both Internet content and service providers.

Our attorneys are keenly aware of the special problems that subpoenas for unpublished information and/or confidential sources present to publishers and broadcasters. We provide counseling and court representation to help broadcasters protect sources, notes, outtakes, and similar information, and to keep journalists off the witness stand.