Fred Goldring grew up as a musician and always wanted to work in the music industry in some way. During his first semester of college, he met with a music lawyer in Philadelphia through a friend of his aunt who was herself a lawyer and was instantly inspired to pursue music and entertainment law as a career (which at the time he didn’t even know existed as a legal specialty). He received his undergraduate degree from Duke University, where he was originally a biomedical engineering major, but after deciding music law was his calling, switched to a liberal arts and business degree. He soon became involved with the Concert Committee by chasing down the then-chairman on the quad begging him for a job; by his junior year he was the chairman.
When Goldring was applying to law school, he was advised by the head of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education that Miami was the most up and coming law school in the country, having just hired Soia Mentschikoff as the dean. The summer after his 1L year, Goldring took a course on entertainment law at New York Law School with Professor Martin Silfen and begged him to hire him as an intern (which he ultimately agreed to do and Goldring worked for free for the summer just for the experience). He spied a notice on the bulletin board from the prior spring semester at New York Law School about a meeting of the Entertainment Law Society which inspired him to create the Entertainment & Sports Law Society at Miami Law during the first semester of his 2L year in 1980. Goldring decided to include sports to broaden student engagement and because he saw the burgeoning overlap between entertainment and sports. Miami also already had a course on sports law taught by Prof. Robert Waters who became faculty sponsor of the new organization.
Silfen was also head of the Practicing Law Institute’s well-known Counseling Clients in the Entertainment Industry CLE program which was held annually in New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville. During the fall semester of his 2L year, Goldring convinced Silfen to hold a “mini PLI” program at the U with four other NY-based entertainment lawyers. To get the money to fund it, Goldring applied for matching funding from a UM graduate school projects fund, getting the matching funds from the American Bar Association Law Student Division. A second ESLS program on sports law was held the next semester with leading lawyers, executives, and agents from the sports industries. ESLS was awarded Best Law School Project in the Nation by the American Bar Association.
Goldring then convinced Dean Mentschikoff to allow him to take a course in music copyright with Professor Alfred Reed in the music school for law school credit, and he also won the $1000 first prize in the annual Nathan Burkan Copyright Competition sponsored by ASCAP. In his spare time Goldring played gigs as a guitarist/vocalist at the Rathskeller and on weekends at the Taurus in Coconut Grove with a friend in the music school graduate program.
After graduating law school, Goldring took the New York bar exam and moved to New York City to work for Weiss, Meibach & Bomser, a prominent music law firm he had worked for during the summer after his 2L year. He took the California bar in February 1983 and passed. When he was working his first job in New York in 1982, music videos had started to become popular almost overnight, so Goldring convinced both his boss at the law firm and an editor at the New York Bar Journal he had become friendly with to publish an article on the numerous unsettled legal issues surrounding music videos (at the time he hadn’t even been officially sworn in yet as a lawyer). The timely article was wildly successful, and Goldring was invited to speak at the Billboard video conference in California as well as asked by Silfen to compile the Music Video section of the well-known multi-volume legal treatise, Lindey on Entertainment, Publishing and the Arts.
After a year and a half in his first job, Goldring received an offer from Grubman Indursky & Schindler, one of the biggest entertainment law firms in the country based in NYC. He worked there for four and a half years before moving to Los Angeles and starting his own practice with Ken Hertz who had been the Head of Music Business & Legal Affairs at Disney (Goldring worked on the Disney account at the Grubman firm as outside counsel). Goldring and Hertz began representing Herbie Hancock as well as Will Smith, Benny Medina, and Jeff Pollack for whom they packaged a new television show with Quincy Jones Productions and NBC called The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, launching Will Smith’s television and movie career.
Goldring then started to represent artists such as Boyz II Men, who (like Smith) were from his hometown of Philadelphia, becoming the biggest R&B artists of all time, and their law practice flourished. He had that practice for over twenty years and worked with some of the biggest music artists in the world including Beyoncé (starting with the representation of Destiny’s Child), Alanis Morissette (whom he got signed to Maverick Records), Seal (whom he got into the Batman Forever soundtrack which relaunched his career), No Doubt, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac, Indigo Girls, Guns ‘N’ Roses, Live, and the Black Eyed Peas.
He came up with the idea for, shopped and made the deal for the Marky Mark Workout video which he then used as a sales tool to get Mark Wahlberg a movie agent, launching his now superstar movie career. He was the Executive Producer with will.i.am. of the iconic “Yes We Can” music video, winning an Emmy, Clio, and NAACP award. He was chair of Rock the Vote from 2004-2005 where he met Barack Obama who was running for the Senate, and subsequently helped him with his presidential campaign. After winning the election in 2008, President Obama appointed Goldring to The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, where he served two terms, being sworn in twice at the Supreme Court, with Justice Breyer and then Justice Kagan. He was a member of the first cultural delegation trip to Cuba in 2016 and led a meeting with the Chinese Cultural Minister in Washington on behalf of the Committee.
Goldring is currently involved with several startups in music and tech as a co-founder including a vinyl record pressing plant based in Poland, several record labels, and a music publishing company.
Recently Goldring reconnected with Miami Law when Ivy Kagan Bierman, fellow Duke graduate and director of the entertainment track of the Entertainment, Art, and Sports Law LLM program, introduced him to the director of the program, Greg Levy. Goldring is impressed by how much the law school has grown since his time here, especially with the entertainment law joint degree programs: the Entertainment, Art, and Sports Law LLM, the J.D./M.A. in Music Industry program, and the J.D./M.A. in Live Entertainment Management program.
Now based in East Hampton, NY, Goldring has been spending more time during the winter in Florida and is looking forward to getting more involved with the entertainment programs at Miami Law, including the Global Entertainment & Sports Law + Industry Conference.
Outside of his career, Goldring remains a devoted musician and records his own music. He played guitar and sang backup with New Radicals at President Biden’s inauguration. He also wrote a song for his daughter’s wedding which he eventually recorded in Jackson Browne’s studio with Peter Asher producing and legendary musicians Leland Sklar and Russ Kunkel as side men (and the New York Times wrote an article about it). Now, he plays in the band Fred and Company and enjoys playing tennis, which he has played since childhood.
Goldring’s advice for aspiring entertainment lawyers is to immerse yourself in the industry reading everything you can find, attending conferences and events so you can stay current on new deals, developments, and trends and the executive revolving doors. Take the time to develop meaningful relationships with people in the industry and become as involved as you can. But most importantly, don’t be afraid to take risks and chances—you never know where it will lead you.
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