For nearly four decades, Lisa E. Davis, chair of the entertainment group at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, has crafted a distinct niche as a go-to lawyer who has advanced and safeguarded the interests of high-profile Black artists and stars. Her clients have included director Spike Lee, writer Terry McMillan, musician Missy Elliott, and currently, actor Wendell Pierce and documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson, among others; the major production and distribution deals that she’s handled span a broad range of sectors: music, film, television, advertising, theater, publishing, and sports.
In her latest endeavor, Davis has authored Our Minds Were Always Free: A History of How Black Brilliance Was Exploited—and the Fight to Retake Control (Simon & Schuster, 2026). The new book captures a sweeping historical arc in the American experience, describing how Black inventors, creatives, and artists have battled to establish and preserve the intellectual property rights to groundbreaking discoveries. The historical figures whose stories Davis tells range from Onesimus, an enslaved African who helped to introduce a method of inoculation against smallpox in the 1700s, to actor Sidney Poitier, who co-founded an independent film production company in 1969 that paved the way for modern media moguls Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry.
In this Q&A, Davis talks about how Spike Lee provided a major turning point in her career, the role NYU Law played in fostering her intellectual curiosity, and why defending individual artistry, creativity, and ingenuity is more urgent than ever before.
Talk about your work. What do you enjoy most and what challenges do you presently face?
I’m a partner at a law firm with 100 lawyers. I love working in this space because I have a deep love for the arts. I enjoy working with creative people, being an advocate, and protecting them in a way that civil rights lawyers protect basic civil rights. I see my role as trying to get artists the best deals possible while preserving their integrity, their authenticity, and their voice in the process.
What I don’t like right now is the speed and enthusiasm with which big corporations are embracing AI—as if human creativity is not something special. What we don’t realize is how much of modern life is owed to the brilliance of Black people, and so to see people assume that those gifts can be mechanized, and that you can just obliterate the need for human beings, is frustrating. All AI is is pattern recognition. It can look backwards, but it cannot look forward. How do we come up with anything new if we take humans out of the equation?
How did you develop an interest in law?
I always joke that I’m one of those freaks of nature because I wanted to be a lawyer since I was eight, while growing up in Brooklyn. In fact, my original goal was to run for president. The presidents I was aware of at the time were lawyers. When I got to Harvard, I joked that I majored in protest and minored in English because I went to college during the era of the divestiture movement and protests against apartheid [in South Africa]. I will never forget the lesson I received as to how intransigent institutions can be.
One day, there were hundreds and hundreds of people protesting in Harvard Yard. And the dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences said to the assembly, “Look, you are here for four years. I am here for life. And Harvard is here forever.” So that made me more pragmatic in my approach to my career. I started thinking about pursuing a career in civil rights law.
Why did you enroll at NYU Law?
I applied to a fair number of schools, including Harvard Law, Georgetown Law, and Columbia Law. It was a schoolmate from Harvard who said that I should apply for a Root-Tilden-Kern scholarship at NYU. When I visited NYU, everyone looked happy. The professors seemed approachable, and the students were being treated with respect. I told myself that I would do better in school if I was happy. I don’t need to be miserable to get a professional degree. And that turned out to be the case.
In reflecting on your time at NYU, what stands out to you?
I had a terrific experience with a lot of stimulating classes and great professors. I had Samuel Estreicher for Civil Procedure. He had a reputation for being kind of tough, but for some reason, our section just ate up the material. He had a couple of expressions that he often used, such as, “Keep your eye on the ball and don’t fall asleep at the switch.” At the end of the school year, we took up a collection and gave him a crystal baseball paperweight from Tiffany. He teared up. And I ended up being his teaching assistant in my third year of law school. One of my students was Sherrilyn Ifill. Ron Ellis [former magistrate judge for the Southern District of New York] was also a great professor and taught Racism in American Law.
After graduating, you clerked for Constance Baker Motley, who was the first Black woman ever to serve as a federal judge. What do you remember about her?
It was incredible for a lot of reasons. She was extremely diligent and hardworking. It was just incredible to have that level of closeness to someone that legendary. One day we were sitting in chambers. And the New York Law Journal had a headline with the new salary that a firm had for first-year associates with new bonuses. And Judge Motley, who had three women law clerks, took the newspaper and showed it to us. She said, “Go get that money. This is what we fought for [in the civil rights movement]. We fought for you to have opportunities in these places.” I followed that advice and became an associate [in 1986] at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP.
What led to your work in entertainment law?
[By the mid-1980s] I started going to panels while trying to build out a network of people who worked in the entertainment space. I was doing general litigation at what is now HSF Kramer. I had a friend from NYU Law, Loretha Jones, who had been working as an entertainment lawyer at Frankfurt. She reached out to me because she was looking for Black accountants who she could refer some clients to. So I gave her some names. When she was leaving the firm to become a producer, she remembered that I had expressed an interest in becoming an entertainment attorney and offered to walk my résumé in.
I was living in Fort Greene [in Brooklyn]. At about the same time, I happened to meet Spike Lee at a party. He was Loretha’s client. I told him about my application. And soon enough, he began pestering the firm about hiring me. When I got to Frankfurt [in 1988], one of the first clients I brought in was Public Enemy. I did not need to hide who I was at work because those were the clients I was working with.
Your book traces the impact of people and inventions from the 18th century to the modern period. How much of this history were you also discovering for the very first time?
I started the book in 2020. I always saw the disparities with how much Black artists got paid versus other creatives; how much our films were marketed as opposed to other films. And what kinds of messages in hip-hop were being promoted and what kinds were suppressed. And so I wanted to go back to the beginning.
I had never heard of [inventor and entrepreneur] Thomas Jennings. His story had a particular resonance with me because my grandfather had a dry cleaning business. To discover that he was the first person to have patented a method of dry cleaning was fascinating to me. I also had never heard of [inventor and landowner] Benjamin Montgomery. That he ended up owning Jefferson Davis’ plantation [in 1866] tells me that history does have a sense of humor.
I have a full-time job. I worked on this book during the early mornings and on weekends. And I had the valuable help of three phenomenal law students as research assistants. I would say, “I’m working on Bessie Smith, find me the case law—the 1909 Copyright Act—that basically enabled people to collect mechanical royalties,” and they would hit the libraries. Then we had weekly meetings to discuss what was found. Next, I would do a deep dive. My joke is that when I felt like the subject was coming out of my ears, then I would start writing.
The exploitation of intellectual property is a story that recurs throughoutOur Minds Were Always Free. Given that focus, what are you hoping readers take away from your work?
When I was writing the proposal, I started with questions such as: Who invented rock and roll? People usually think, “Oh, Chuck Berry and Little Richard.” That gives Black people the credit. But that doesn’t actually go far enough. And it’s not actually accurate. Now, thanks to people like [singer-songwriter] Lizzo, more people know about the role that Sister Rosetta Tharpe had. But many people still don’t fully know her story. And the same is true of Bessie Smith, who got completely ripped off. And so this book is both a cautionary tale and an instruction manual for creatives and for Black people in this moment.
The point is that when you look at how much money people were making, even 30 or 25 years ago, you see how much [less compensation] that same level of success garners now. That is why all of these ’90s acts are on tour, because they’re not making royalties. [Writer and sociologist] Tressie McMillan Cottom had a video recently in which she described how people were lamenting that we no longer have Prince, Michael Jackson, or Dolly Parton—but she then wondered whether we have a society or a system that is going to create the next one.
My book is a tip of the iceberg. As a society, we need to be thinking about the art that we love, the innovations that we rely on—who came up with them and under what conditions, both in terms of the law and the business. That’s why I go back to the Constitution. We need to think about whether we are incentivizing the creativity that makes people’s lives worth living.
What advice do you have for current students at the Law School?
I am proudly a nerd. And the best lawyers are nerds who love people because it is a people profession. But you also have to be meticulous and analytical. The law students of today should be thinking about how we can remake the legal system so that it works to promote justice and fairness in 2026. We’ve seen how it can be perverted and how it can be subverted. We’ve seen the ways in which it does not work for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ people, and for disabled people. That doesn’t mean that everybody has to be a civil rights lawyer, but people should be thinking about policy, politics, and the law. And ultimately, they should be thinking about how all of that can actually do good things for people.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Photo by Christopher Warner.
News Information
Related News:
Dawn Botti ’94 talks about the big roles that curiosity and contracts have played in her entertainment law career
