As the legal battle over Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us” gets underway, both sides have retained top attorneys – with Drake hiring a lawyer who battles conspiracy theories and Universal Music Group turning to one of its favorite law firms.
Filed last week, Drake’s case accuses UMG of defaming him by boosting Lamar’s track, which attacks Drake as a “certified pedophile” and has become a chart-topping hit in its own right. The star says his own label “waged a campaign against him,” spreading a “malicious narrative” that it knew was false.
The courtroom showdown has drawn intense publicity, and it’s not hard to see why: It pits one of the world’s biggest stars against the world’s biggest music company after a lucrative, decade-plus partnership, over a smash hit song by a critically-adored rapper – one who’s set to perform at the Super Bowl next month, by the way. It also represents something of an unprecedented move in the history of hip hop: A lawsuit over a rap beef that allegedly went too far.
To handle that kind of high-profile case, Drake has hired Michael Gottlieb, a former federal prosecutor who once served as a former associate counsel in the Obama White House. Gottlieb is currently a partner at the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, a national firm with a well-known music industry practice that has repeatedly been featured on Billboard‘s yearly Top Music Lawyers.
Based on his recent work, Gottlieb is unlikely to be intimidated by the media attention surrounding Drake’s lawsuit. He’s currently representing two Georgia poll workers in efforts to collect a huge verdict against Rudy Guiliani over his lies about election fraud, a case that just settled last week after high-profile court hearings in New York. He’s also repping Blake Lively in her battles against “It Ends With Us” co-star Justin Baldoni, including her harassment case as well as Baldoni’s libel countersuit – cases that have transcended the courtroom and crossed firmly into the messier world of public relations.
In Lively’s suit, she says she was the victim of a sophisticated “digital retaliation campaign” centered “manipulation” of social media designed to destroy her reputation across the internet. Those kinds of claims are nothing new for Gottlieb, who has made a name for himself in recent years filing defamation lawsuits on behalf of alleged victims of online disinformation.
In 2023, he won the $148 million defamation verdict against Giuliani. Before that, he represented the brother of Seth Rich, a Democratic staffer whose murder became grist for right-wing conspiracy theories, as well as the owners of the D.C. pizzeria at the center of Pizzagate — an infamous online hoax centered on false claims of child sex trafficking that later sparked a real-life shooting.
In bringing Drake’s case to court, Gottlieb has raised similar allegations against UMG. He argues that the label used secret payments and bot streams to help spread a “dangerous conspiracy theory” about his client on the internet, putting the rapper at risk of serious physical harm. He even cites the Pizzagate shooting by name, calling a shooting at Drake’s house the “2024 equivalent” of that earlier incident: “UMG’s greed yielded real world consequences.”
Defending against those claims, court records show that UMG has retained the law firm Sidley Austin — one of the largest of the country’s elite “BigLaw” firms, and one that has repeatedly repped the music giant in past legal battles.
Sidley attorneys represented UMG when the label was the named as a defendant in the copyright lawsuit filed by Marvin Gaye’s heirs over Robin Thicke and Pharrell’s chart-topper “Blurred Lines” – a case that transfixed the music industry for years. The firm also handled certain stages of a long-running copyright case filed by UMG’s Capitol Records against the video sharing site Vimeo over internet takedown rules.
More recently, Sidley defended UMG against a class action accusing the label of unfairly refusing to allow hundreds of artists win back control of their copyrights — eventually winning a key ruling that effectively gutted the case. The firm also won a decision last year killing another case filed by the hip hop duo Black Sheep, who accused UMG of securing its stake in Spotify by giving the streamer a “sweetheart” licensing rate that left artists underpaid by millions.
The firm has also handled numerous music matters outside the UMG orbit. Sidley attorneys have also repped Warner Music Group – including in transactional work like the label’s joint venture deal with Elliot Grainge’s label 10K Projects and its $400 million acquisition of 300 Entertainment, as well as defending the company against litigation like a copyright termination case filed by Dwight Yoakam.
As of Monday, the only Sidley attorney to formally appear in Drake’s case is Nicholas P. Crowell, a New York attorney focused on complex commercial litigation, though he’ll almost certainly be joined by other firm attorneys as the case progresses. Top members of the music team at Sidley include litigator Rollin A. Ransom and deals attorney Matthew C. Thompson – both of whom have also repeatedly been named to Billboard’s list of Top Music Lawyers.
If recent work is any indication, the attorneys at Sidley will take an aggressive approach to a lawsuit that UMG itself has already publicly blasted as “illogical” and “frivolous.”
Ransom and other Sidley attorneys are currently defending UMG against Limp Bizkit’s $200 million royalties lawsuit, a case filed in October that claims the band had “not seen a dime in royalties” because of “systemic” and “fraudulent” policies. The lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the case just a month later, ripping the lawsuit’s “entire narrative” as “fiction” and “based on a fallacy.” Last week, a judge sided with those arguments and rejected core aspects of the band’s case.
The firm will file its first response to Drake’s lawsuit in March.
