A Creator Economy Lawyer Just Confirmed it...

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Welcome back to Creator Etiquette®.

Shermin Lahka is the founder of LVLUP Legal, The Connected Table, and Tiger Tiger Creative, and she is the kind of attorney who actually exists inside the creator economy rather than observing it from the outside. She built her law practice on social media starting in 2019, which means she understands both sides of the table in a way that most legal professionals simply do not.

If you would rather listen, the full conversation is on YouTube and Spotify.

Most agents take 20% of your deals. What they actually provide in exchange for that is access to a few relationships and negotiation. They are not doing significant outreach or fighting for specific contract language. They are mostly making emails happen and taking a meaningful percentage of the money you make.

A lawyer, by contrast, can negotiate the clauses that actually determine how much a deal is worth in the long run. They can handle exclusivity scope, ad usage duration, usage rights across platforms, and can make it possible to work with multiple brands in adjacent categories. If your brand deals are consistently in the five-to-six-figure range, a lawyer is probably the better investment.

Priyanka Chopra is simultaneously the face of Rolex and Bulgari, two luxury brands that would normally be considered competitors. The way she is able to do that legally is through what is called a carve out clause. Her Bulgari contract specifically carves out watches as a category, which means that agreement does not restrict her from representing a watch brand like Rolex. Two competing deals, zero legal conflict.

Shermin's point is that most creators do not know this kind of clause exists, let alone that they can and should be negotiating for it. The time to build carve outs into a contract is before you sign, not after you have already accepted exclusivity terms that are broader than you realized.

Brand contracts are starting to include language around AI, and the language is not always clear.

Shermin is seeing clauses that prohibit creators from using AI clones of themselves to fulfill the deliverable. Most people are not doing that anyway, so those clauses are not the concern. The concern is the vague language around AI that could theoretically encompass using AI to write a script, generate captions, or edit video.

Most brands are fine with AI-assisted scripting and editing. What they are not fine with is a creator outsourcing their actual identity to a model. But because the language in contracts often does not make that distinction clearly, it is worth having a lawyer review any AI clause before you sign something that accidentally limits tools you use every day.

If brands can get a UGC creator to hand over their name, image, and likeness and then use AI to generate 40 pieces of content from that one session, why would they keep paying individual creators at full rate? Shermin's answer is that an engaged, loyal audience is not replicable. AI can clone a face. It cannot clone the reason someone actually trusts you.

Shermin said that if a brief feels overwhelming or a contract has language you are not sure about, take it, upload it into your AI tool and ask it what you need to make sure you are hitting.

I do this all the time, and my setup for it lives entirely inside Adobe Acrobat. When a brand deal comes in, I upload the brief, the contract, and any supporting documents into an Adobe Acrobat PDF Space, which is one shared, secure space that holds everything related to that deal. Then I use Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant to ask specific questions: What are the usage rights being granted? What is the exclusivity scope and duration? Are there any AI-related clauses I should flag? What are my deliverables and timeline?

Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant reads the actual documents you have uploaded and pulls answers from your specific files from the exact contract in front of you. For something as consequential as a brand deal or a talent agreement, that specificity matters enormously.

PDF Spaces becomes my shared document hub for any active deal. Everything is in one place. I can leave comments, review brand assets, and go back to any document quickly rather than digging through email threads. If I want to review something before a call, I can ask AI Assistant to summarize the key terms and flag anything unusual in about thirty seconds.

Try it for your next brand deal: https://creatorlink.shop/4ltg0sM

Shermin has a creator client who came to her saying she wanted to make a million dollars a year. Shermin's response was to simplify the entire structure. Five to ten videos a month, priced between five and ten thousand dollars each. At that rate, with consistent execution, she hits a million annually, all because she is not spending all her time emailing, following up, and negotiating, she is also actually able to focus on making content she cares about.

The framework is makers and managers. Makers create. Managers manage. If you are a creator, you are a maker, and the more of your time you spend doing manager work (chasing payments, negotiating clauses, handling administration), the less you are doing the thing that makes you valuable in the first place. The solution is not to get better at the manager tasks. It is to hire people who are better at them than you will ever be, give them clear parameters, and protect your time for creating.

I asked Shermin to explain the difference between trademarking your brand name and copyrighting your content, and which one matters more.

Copyright protects the content you create. It exists automatically the moment you create something original. You do not need to register it, though registration helps if you ever need to enforce it.

A trademark protects the name, the brand identity, the vessel that holds everything. And Shermin made a point that reframed this for me entirely: a trademark is not just protection. It is equity. If you ever want to sell your business, license your brand, partner with a platform, or be acquired, the trademark is what makes the brand a transferable asset rather than just a social media presence. Trying to do that without a trademark in place is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes she sees.

Creator Etiquette® is trademarked. That is not just about stopping someone from copying the name, it is about building something with real, long-term transferable value.

Here is what Shermin told me to look out for in any talent management agreement before you sign it. Most of them include a sunset clause, which means that even after you terminate the agreement, the manager continues to receive a percentage of deals they originated for a defined period, sometimes years. Many include a cancellation penalty or early termination fee. And some are structured in ways that make it nearly impossible to exit cleanly, requiring demand letters and, in the cases she has personally handled, going all the way to litigation.

The protection on the front end is to negotiate for a non-exclusive agreement wherever possible, and to carve out any business categories or revenue streams you already own or plan to build independently. This is called the Bethany clause (named after Bethany Frankel), who is widely understood to have carved out Skinnygirl from the Bravo / Real Housewives deal she signed, which is why Bravo did not get a piece of that sale. Apply the same logic. Carve out any speaking deals, book deals, equity deals, etc that you are already building before you sign.

Go follow Shermin on LinkedIn and Instagram! She is one of the most accessible and genuinely useful attorneys working in the creator economy, and she is exactly the kind of person this community needs more of. Also make sure to check out LVLUP Legal.

Welcome to Creator Etiquette®. I am so glad you are here.

Xo, Gigi Robinson
Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom 🐾

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