Brand deals are getting bigger — and so are the legal stakes. RLG protects influencers, digital entrepreneurs, and creator-led businesses with the same caliber of counsel we bring to every client.
You've built something real — a following, a brand, a business. But the contracts brands send you are written to protect them, not you. Your content has real monetary value, and most creators are one bad deal, one stolen trademark, or one FTC violation away from losing everything they've built.
Traditional law firms don't understand the creator economy. Roberts Legal Group does — because we've been inside it, negotiating deals, recovering handles, and protecting the intellectual property of creators at every level.
Book a Creator Consultation →Brands routinely send contracts with perpetual usage rights, no kill fees, and indemnification clauses that can cost you six figures. Most creators sign without reading them.
We've seen creators build six-figure followings only to lose their brand name to someone who filed a trademark first. Without registration, you have no federal protection.
Unregistered copyright limits your ability to recover meaningful damages. Federal registration lets you sue for statutory damages and attorney's fees when your work is stolen.
The FTC issued fines up to $50,000 per violation in 2024. Non-compliance can result in platform bans and reputational damage that costs far more than legal counsel ever would.
From your brand name to your brand deals, we handle the full spectrum of creator legal needs — with the speed and fluency the creator economy demands.
Register your brand name, logo, and creative assets before someone else does. We handle USPTO filings, clearance searches, and ongoing portfolio monitoring.
Learn More → 02Secure registered copyright on your courses, content collections, digital products, and signature works. Registration unlocks statutory damages and enforcement rights.
Learn More → 03Contract review, drafting, and negotiation support for brand partnerships, UGC agreements, affiliate deals, licensing arrangements, and collaboration contracts.
Learn More → 04LLC formation in all 50 states, EIN registration, operating agreements, and the legal structure that separates a protected business from a personal liability exposure.
Learn More → 05Disclosure compliance, platform terms guidance, and regulatory advisory for brand-sponsored content across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and all major platforms.
Learn More → 06Cease and desist letters, content takedowns, platform handle recovery, and litigation support when your intellectual property is infringed, stolen, or misappropriated.
Learn More →Every creator — at every stage — needs these three layers of legal protection in place. Here's what each involves and why it matters.
Your brand name, logo, and creative work are your most valuable business assets. Without legal protection, they're vulnerable — even after you've built something significant.
A creator without proper business structure is personally liable for every deal they sign. An LLC and airtight contracts are non-negotiable once real money is involved.
FTC disclosure rules, platform terms of service, and privacy law apply to creators — regardless of following size. Violations can result in fines, bans, and lawsuits that are entirely preventable.
These aren't hypothetical scenarios. They are the situations that bring creators to our office — after the damage is already done.
Platform music libraries are licensed for organic content only. Using them in sponsored posts or paid brand campaigns violates licensing terms — and record labels are actively and aggressively pursuing creators for these violations. What makes this particularly dangerous is the retroactive nature of the exposure: content that's already been published, monetized, and paid for can still become the subject of a licensing demand. The financial exposure scales with how widely your content was distributed, how many platforms it appeared on, whether it was used in a paid campaign, and how long it remained live.
By the time a licensing demand letter arrives, the decisions about your exposure have already been made without you. The earlier legal counsel is involved — before a claim escalates — the more options remain available to you.
Brands cancel deals after you've blocked your calendar, turned down other opportunities, paid for production costs, and in many cases completed the work entirely. Without a kill fee clause in the contract, the brand's only obligation is an apology. The financial damage extends beyond the lost deal fee — it includes the opportunity cost of everything you declined, the production expenses you won't recover, and the time invested in deliverables that will never be published or paid for. The brand's legal team wrote that contract with full awareness of what it was doing. The question is whether your interests were represented with equal intentionality.
Contracts without cancellation protections transfer the entire risk of the brand's internal decisions onto you. RLG reviews and negotiates brand deals before you sign — when there is still something to protect.
A single sponsored Instagram post — produced and delivered for a fixed fee — can be repurposed into a national billboard campaign, a television commercial, a website hero image, and a paid social ad campaign by the same brand, all for the original post rate. If the contract grants broad or unlimited usage rights, the brand has done nothing legally wrong. The scope of what a brand can do with your content is determined almost entirely by the usage rights clause — language that most creators don't negotiate and some never read. The difference between a defined license and "all media in perpetuity" can represent tens of thousands of dollars — or significantly more, depending on the brand's campaign scale.
Usage rights are one of the highest-value, most consistently misunderstood areas of creator contract law. The clause is already in every deal you've signed. The question is what it actually says.
Creators complete entire projects — concept developed, filmed, revised through multiple rounds, approved by the brand's legal and marketing teams — and then the brand goes silent. No deposit means no secured payment and no meaningful leverage after the work is done. The legal remedies available after the fact are more limited, more expensive, and far less predictable than the contractual protections that would have been in place before a single deliverable was produced. Demand letters, small claims filings, and breach of contract claims all require time, documentation, and cost. The payment structure in the contract you signed before starting determines your legal position when a brand stops responding.
Chasing unpaid invoices without proper contractual protections is a difficult and often incomplete recovery. RLG structures creator agreements so your payment protection is built in — before the work begins.
Two creators build something together — a podcast, a brand, a co-produced content series, or a shared community. The relationship eventually changes. Now both parties are claiming ownership, disputing revenue splits, arguing over who controls the platform accounts, the intellectual property, and the audience. Without a written agreement, questions about ownership default to general legal principles that were not designed with the creator economy in mind. Platform handles, monetization access, brand deal proceeds, copyright ownership of the content itself — all become contested. Resolving these disputes can take months of legal proceedings and cost more than the collaboration ever generated. By the time a dispute reaches this stage, the business you built together may be effectively frozen.
The only way to fully prevent these disputes is to define the terms before any content is created. If a collaboration is already underway without an agreement in place, the window to protect your interests is still open — but it closes the longer you wait.
The Creator Protection Vault™ is RLG's signature membership product — six modules of creator-specific legal protection, available at three membership tiers. Attorney-drafted templates, compliance resources, and legal tools built into your monthly workflow.
Not a course. Not a template shop. A professional legal resource for creators who are serious about the business they're building.
Vault membership is the bridge between discovering you need legal protection and building a true ongoing relationship with an RLG attorney. Every tier feeds into Creator Counsel on Call™ for members who are ready for more.
Every product in the RLG Creator ecosystem is engineered to move you one rung higher. Build on a legal foundation and grow into a true attorney relationship — at the pace your business demands.