Our lawyers represent clients across the art world in their most consequential disputes, transactions, and advisory matters. Our practice combines sophisticated commercial litigation experience with unmatched fluency in the art market.
Typical clients include auction houses, galleries, dealers, artists, artists' estates and foundations, individual and institutional collectors, donors, and museums.
Our lawyers handle disputes over artwork on the primary and secondary markets, including title disputes; conversion and replevin claims; restitution claims, including those arising under the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act and involving cross-border choice-of-law issues; authenticity disputes; fraud claims; and disputes with insurance carriers.
Our lawyers have also handled disputes among art market players, including over consignment and sale agreements; related to commissions, irrevocable bids, and auction guarantees; concerning employment matters for both small organizations and large institutions; between artists and galleries; and concerning gallery partnerships, including arising under the New York Limited Liability Company Law.
Our practice also extends to litigation involving artists' estates and those of high-net-worth individual collectors, including proceedings before the New York Surrogate's Court and matters involving the oversight role of the New York Attorney General's Charities Bureau.
On the transactional and advisory side, our lawyers negotiate consignment, guarantee, and irrevocable bid agreements; purchase and sale agreements; gallery representation agreements; commission agreements; gifts and loan of art agreements; artist management contracts; licensing agreements; and brand deals. We also counsel clients on catalogue raisonné issues and museum loan and donation agreements.
Our lawyers' market knowledge is informed by longstanding institutional and personal relationships across the art world, including in-house experience at a leading international auction house, and by active participation in the art law bar, including the Art Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association.
