Podcast News

A few years into her career, Alexia Bedat thought she’d landed her dream job doing legal work in film and television. It wasn’t just exciting, it was the opportunity to learn from lawyers who’d been doing it for decades. “There’s very much a specific language you need to know to work in film and television,” Bedat says.

But one day in 2019, she got a nasty phone call from a lawyer on the other side of a deal. “This lawyer absolutely berated me—to the point of tears,” she says. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be another way to grow and build a practice in entertainment law.’”

There was. Working with a podcast production company, she noticed something different about negotiations: Nobody had the upper hand because nobody had been doing it for decades. “Everybody was figuring this out,” she says. “There was no single way to do things.”

Now a partner at Klaris Law in New York, Bedat has spent the years since building one of the more specialized practices in entertainment law: podcasts and new media. “Identifying an area that I could grow with, and get to know, allowed me to find my professional voice,” she says.

She mostly reps production companies in their agreements with distribution platforms, ad providers or talent. Though she doesn’t like to talk about clients in the press, a recent Hollywood Reporter article mentions that she’s represented Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions; Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries; and executives like Max Cutler, who founded Pave Studios.

Both she and the podcast industry have come a long way. The medium really took off in 2014 when Serial, an investigative program about the 1999 murder of a teenage girl in Baltimore, introduced millions of listeners to the format. These days, about 200,000 podcasts launch per year. By 2030, the market is projected to be worth $17.6 billion.

For all the noise, the art of the podcast remains quiet intimacy. It’s the voice in your ear while you cook, walk, commute—a presence that travels with you—and it’s what hooked Bedat as a listener. “There are certain podcasts that I listen to,” she says, “and I know it sounds silly, but I feel like I truly know the host.”

That intimacy, she says, is also what makes podcast advertising perform as well as it does. Hosts make ad-reads personal, sometimes funny, and always their own. Skip rates on advertisements are lower in podcasts than virtually any other digital medium, she notes. “The combination of in-your-ears authenticity and immediacy—that’s why people have such strong reactions,” she says.

Although the listening experience has stayed somewhat consistent, the legal architecture underneath has not. When Bedat started doing podcast deals, they were pretty straightforward: a production company, a show, an RSS feed, some ad revenue. Now it might encompass live events, merchandise, social media commitments, licensing agreements with streaming platforms, vertical video content for TikTok, and community platforms. She’s even started to wonder whether the nomenclature still fits.

“Is it appropriate to call it a content deal, a media deal, a brand deal, a community deal?” she asks. “Because it’s not just this one thing anymore.”

What distinguishes podcast deals from their film and television counterparts, she adds, is where the power sits. In traditional entertainment deals, the financing party tends to hold most of the cards. In podcasting, talent holds unusual leverage—without host buy-in, the enterprise collapses. “The relationship they need to have with their audience is nonnegotiable,” she says. 

Doing this work well requires being something of a generalist. A podcast company with a book imprint, a merchandise line, and a touring schedule needs a lawyer who understands publishing royalties, venue liability, and distribution logistics—not just audio rights.

Bedat, who grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, then studied law at Cambridge and got her LLM at Columbia, traces some of her approach to an unlikely early stop: a 2016 clerkship at BuzzFeed. There, she found herself on a legal team that treated creativity as a professional value. “Fun and creativity are the two words that immediately jump to mind,” she says of that time.

She has tried to carry both into her practice. “I think if you look at fun in the right way,” she says, “lawyers can, and should, have fun.”