Court Sanctions Liebowitz $103K! Requires Service Of A Copy Of The Order On All Of His Clients And Filing In All Of His Cases!! But Can The Court Do That?

• Published date: 02 July 2020
• Subject Matter: Intellectual Property, Litigation, Mediation & Arbitration, Copyright, Arbitration & Dispute Resolution, Trials & Appeals & Compensation
• Law Firm: Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz
• Author: Mr Edward Rosenthal and Tyler Maulsby

If you heard a collective gasp last Friday, it could have been caused by the latest news about prolific copyright infringement filer Richard Liebowitz. SDNY Judge Jesse M. Furman added to the growing list of sanctions awards against Liebowitz when he imposed sanctions against Liebowitz and the firm in the amount of $103,517.49, and also imposed a series of somewhat extraordinary non-monetary sanctions, including requiring Liebowitz to serve a copy of the Court's Opinion and Order on all of his clients and to file a copy of the order in all of his currently pending cases and in any new case commenced in the next year. Judge Furman's June 26, 2020 Opinion and Order (the "Order") in Usherson v. Bandshell Artist Management can be found here.

My immediate reaction to this news was both to say: "Did you see what happened to Liebowitz?" and also to ask, "Can the court do that?" So, I asked my colleague Tyler Maulsby, who is in our firm's Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Group and chairs the New York City Bar Association's Committee on Professional Ethics, to address the latter question.

The Order

Before turning things over to Tyler, let's take a brief look at what happened here. Judge Furman's 54-page decision is worth reading, because it describes a litany of lies and misrepresentations to the Court, many of which were under oath. Liebowitz's problems started when he disregarded orders concerning an upcoming mediation, and were aggravated when neither he nor his client showed up at the mediation (instead he sent two "associates," including his sister, Rebecca Liebowitz, who apparently is newly admitted to the bar). Then, after the defendant's motion for sanctions led to an evidentiary hearing, Liebowitz lied under oath about whether the mediator gave him and his client permission to appear at the mediation telephonically. To put a final nail in the Liebowitz coffin, it turned out that the copyright in the photograph that was the subject of the complaint had not been registered prior to the commencement of the case, a fatal deficiency.

This was, of course, not an isolated incident for Liebowitz, who has been criticized and sanctioned in many of the 2000+ copyright cases he has filed in the SDNY and elsewhere in the few years since he graduated from law school and was admitted to the bar. Indeed, Judge Furman attached to his Order an Appendix listing 36 such instances (see the link above).

In the interest of brevity, here is a quote from Judge Furman's Order, in which he refers to a recent incident where Liebowitz was found to have lied to another SDNY judge about the date of the death of his own grandfather in an attempt to justify a missed court date, and summarizes Liebowitz's conduct in this case:

"One might think that a lawyer with this record would tread carefully, particularly before a judge who had recently sanctioned him. See Rice v. NBCUniversal Media, LLC, No. 19-CV-447 (JMF), 2019 WL 3000808, at *4 (S.D.N.Y. July 10, 2019). But - as this case makes clear - not Mr. Liebowitz. In November of last year, Mr. Liebowitz appeared, in the company of a...