There's nothing particularly legally exciting about this case. But it does involve a quasi-celebrity -- Rosa Blasi (the star of the TV series "Strong Medicine," which I admit I had never even heard of before this appeal -- who's being sued by her personal manager. Which is something you don't see every day. So I thought I'd mention it. If only for the Hollywood types out there.
Personally, I don't really understand what personal managers do for their ten (or even, as here, fifteen) percent. Justice Rothschild explains it a little bit. But as far as I can tell, they're simply enablers, and do the stuff that people should do for themselves. Ten percent for that? Seems a bit high.
But what do I know. Anyway, there's some potential overlap between what a personal manager does for ten percent and what a talent agent does for fifteen percent, and since you have to have a license for the latter (but not the former), sometimes you have fights. Like here. Which only gets more complicated when you have difficult severability issues and disputes about whether particular unlicensed conduct by authorizes talent to terminate the manager's contract.
A Hollywood fight. In the end, Rosa ain't out of the woods yet, and the Court of Appeal reverses the grant of summary judgment on her behalf. So the fight goes on.
