Counsel to Council

When Super Bowl XLVII packed the Superdome back in 2013, intellectual property attorney Lesli Harris found herself in the middle of some of the off-the-field action.

Harris was part of the New Orleans-based legal team tasked with weeding out counterfeit merchandise from the team-related paraphernalia that saturates the host city ahead of the big game. In the weeks leading up to the showdown between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens, she and colleagues at Stone Pigman Walther Wittmann worked closely with “secret shoppers” deployed by the NFL to spot trademark infringements and counterfeit jerseys, caps, banners and other items being offered for sale through local shops and websites.

Intentional roughness was to be avoided. “You don’t want to play hardball and turn off fans who are using this merchandise to honor their teams,” Harris says. “You have to use more of a soft touch where you educate the sellers about trademarks and explain what they can and can’t legally use.”

That meant sending cease-and-desist letters and filing John Doe lawsuits seeking injunctions against sellers who were violating trademark or copyright law. Actual injunctions rarely came into play, Harris says, because the effort to educate sellers about trademark issues usually brought the illegal sales to a halt.

Harris would continue honing her trademark and copyright skills for the Saints and the NBA’s Pelicans, the latter of which drew her into a case involving one of the team’s mascots: the infamous King Cake Baby. In 2019, the mascot’s designer sued Universal Studios after the release of the slasher movie Happy Death Day, which featured a killer that looked similar to the mascot. Harris showed that the team did not own rights to the mascot design (the studio ultimately settled the case in 2021).

One of her most rewarding Saints-related cases came when a local recording business claimed to have invented the iconic phrase “Who Dat?” and sued the team over its use. Harris and company wound up doing a deep dive into the origins of the phrase. “We even hired linguistics professors to talk about the etymology,” she says.

While the Saints eventually reached a confidential settlement with the company, Harris feels the most important outcome was showing that the team had not stolen the phrase. “It became an intense litigation, but ultimately, we made clear that ‘Who Dat’ is a fan-created phrase that belongs to the people and not the Saints,” she says.

Harris’ IP work isn’t limited to sports. In 2008, while pursuing an LL.M. in trade regulation at New York University, she did legal work for NBCUniversal Media Group, where she focused on policing and enforcing trademark rights of Bravo’s The Real Housewives reality TV franchise.

Returning to New Orleans after obtaining her LL.M., Harris also took on a trade dress infringement matter, bringing a claim on behalf of a California clothier that believed a New Orleans shop had copied some of its designs. “We not only looked at how similar the clothing looked to our client’s designs, but also whether the setup of the shops looks so similar that a customer could be confused about ownership of a particular store,” she says. The case wound up settling.

Coming from “a family of creatives,” Harris, an Ohio native, earned an undergraduate art history degree from the University of Virginia before coming to New Orleans by way of Tulane University Law School.

After moving to Kelly Hart & Hallman, where she’s now senior counsel, Harris spent several years as chief of staff and executive counsel to the president at Loyola University New Orleans. She says that interacting with various constituencies of the university was a little like helping to run a city—so perhaps it was inevitable that in 2021, with encouragement from friends and colleagues, she ran for a seat on the New Orleans City Council, representing the city’s District B—and won.

Today, Harris divides her time between her law firm work and the council, where she is particularly proud of gaining funding for a new city agency tasked with counteracting homelessness. In 2024, the agency helped house more than 700 previously unhoused residents. And she helped ensure that the agency will receive funding “for efforts in 2025 and beyond.”

“It was a very successful education effort,” Harris says. “I think that being a trademark and copyright attorney really helped me, because it requires making people understand what’s involved in an issue, step by step.”