We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Katherine De Vos Devine a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Katherine , appreciate you joining us today. Please tell us about starting your own firm and if you’d do anything different knowing what you know now.
Artists asked me first.
While I was working in museums and arts consulting, people would pull me aside and ask for help with a contract, a copyright question, a trademark. I’d refer them to excellent colleagues. They’d come back. The lawyer talked too fast. Hadn’t understood their work. Made them feel like a problem to be processed rather than a professional with something worth protecting.
I kept hearing this, and I started to understand why. My legal training and my doctoral research in art history were never separate tracks; they were always informing each other. I was learning IP law and learning how artists think, make, and communicate at the same time, in conversation with each other. That fluency isn’t incidental to legal practice when your clients are creative professionals. It *is* the practice. By 2020, it was time to stop referring artists to other lawyers and start serving them myself.
I started de Vos Devine Law as a solo practice. The early days were an education in everything law school skips: pricing, business development, building systems that scale, learning to articulate precisely who you serve and why it matters. The challenge that surprised me most wasn’t legal. It was relational. Creative industries are tight ecosystems; a gallery owner, a represented artist, a licensing agent, and a production company are often in each other’s professional orbits for decades. Traditional legal practice treats disputes as isolated problems to be won. In creative communities, winning that way can cost your client their entire network. My focus became protecting both the creative work and the professional relationships that sustain it.
In 2023, I brought my husband, Robert, on as a partner, and we renamed the firm Implement Legal. (The name does double work: a verb meaning to put something into action, and a noun meaning the tool you use to do it!) I’m genuinely lucky; I happened to be married to exactly the person I needed and wanted to build this with. Robert’s Fortune 50 transaction experience at Cleary Gottlieb brought a systematic, preventive precision that complemented everything I was doing, and together we saw that the firm could be more than counsel — it could be infrastructure. We built a three-tier model: Implement Tools (contract templates for early-stage creatives), Implement Legal (strategic counsel for growing creative businesses), and Implement Aid (pro bono services for creative professionals in need). In the Implement ecosystem, a creative professional can find the right kind of legal support at every stage of their business, not just when a crisis forces the issue.
If I could do one thing differently: stop thinking about what *I* wanted, much sooner. de Vos Devine Law was designed around me, how I wanted the website to look, how I wanted the copy to read. Implement Legal was designed with our clients’ ease of use in mind. A brand that doesn’t connect with the person who needs you is just self-expression. For any young professional considering this path, know who you serve before you open your doors, and define that as precisely as you can. The more specific your answer, the more clearly everything else organizes around it.
Katherine , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m an intellectual property attorney practicing what I call relational law: legal strategy that protects both your creative work and the professional relationships your business depends on.
My practice covers copyright, trademark, and licensing for businesses built on intellectual property, including production companies, art studios, and independent artists, as well as wellness practitioners and tech startups. Our firm also handles complex business transactions, including mergers and acquisitions, where intellectual property is the primary asset. Rob is a patent lawyer (which is actually very different from copyright and trademark!), and he heads up our general counsel program, working with clients as their in-house lawyer. Together, we work with creative businesses generating real revenue who need sophisticated legal advice without the overhead of a large firm.
What sets us apart starts with pattern recognition. Most IP attorneys come to creative industries from the outside. I came from the inside. My doctoral research examined how artists actually engage with questions of originality, authorship, and appropriation. I’ve run arts organizations, advised creative businesses, and spent years inside the communities our clients operate in. I understand how creatives communicate, how creative businesses function, and why standard legal advice so often fails them.
The usual playbook treats legal disputes as isolated problems to be won. In creative industries, that approach can be catastrophic. A gallery owner, a represented artist, a licensing partner, and a studio are often in each other’s professional orbits for decades. Winning aggressively can cost a client their entire network. Relational law is built around a different premise: you shouldn’t have to choose between your rights and your collaborators.
I also write about these issues. My Substack, Protect Your Magic, connects IP law to art history, commons scholarship, and the structural forces shaping creative industries right now. My LinkedIn newsletter, The Secret Weapon, covers IP strategy for creative businesses. Both are free. Both are written for people who want to understand the landscape they’re operating in, not just follow rules someone handed them.
What I’m most proud of is the Implement ecosystem we’ve built. Implement Tools offers contract templates for early-stage creatives who need legal infrastructure before they can afford ongoing counsel. Implement Legal provides strategic counsel for growing creative businesses. Implement Aid provides pro bono services for creative professionals who need help and can’t pay for it. The three tiers exist because the justice gap in creative industries is real, and addressing it requires more than one kind of solution.
What I want potential clients to know: good legal counsel isn’t about fear management. It’s about building something that holds. The lawyers who sell anxiety as a service are doing their clients a disservice — legal strategy works best when it’s proactive, not reactive. If you’re a creative business with real work to protect and real relationships to preserve, that’s exactly what we do.
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
Everyone assumes a virtual law firm runs on digital marketing. For years, I assumed the same thing.
I was on social media constantly — sharing, educating, posting, connecting. I was doing everything right by every metric that matters in this industry. It also made me quietly miserable, and I started to notice that the clients and colleagues I valued most weren’t coming from Instagram.
In the last quarter of 2025, I stopped. Not dramatically — I didn’t announce a social media detox or write a LinkedIn post about quitting LinkedIn. I just redirected the time. Handwritten letters. Holiday gifts chosen with actual thought. Coffee dates. Studio visits. The kind of contact that requires you to know something specific about the person you’re reaching out to.
The first quarter of 2026 has been the most successful in the firm’s history.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. The entire premise of our work is that creative businesses run on networks of recurring relationships, not transactions. It turns out the firm runs the same way. The referrals that matter, the clients who stay, the colleagues who send their people to us — none of that was happening through an algorithm. It was happening because someone remembered a conversation, a letter, or a visit.
This year, I’m going further. Joining a client’s book club. Taking a colleague’s class. Showing up in the ways that are harder to scale and impossible to automate. Not as a strategy, exactly — as a practice. It’s the same instinct that makes relational law work: you can’t protect what matters from a distance.
Any advice for managing a team?
My best advice for managing a team comes from the same place as my best advice for clients: you’re in this for the long haul, so act like it.
Robert and I work together as partners in both senses of the word: we’re married and share a business. That means the stakes are high and the feedback loops are short. What keeps it working is the same set of principles I’d offer any creative business navigating a long-term collaboration. Assume the best of your teammate. Don’t take things personally. Be unfailingly honest. Be as kind as you can, as often as you can. These aren’t soft skills; they’re operational commitments.
I also love personality frameworks like DISC, the Enneagram, and MBTI. Used well, these tools do something practically valuable: they depersonalize feedback. When you understand that a colleague processes conflict differently, or needs more information before they can commit, or leads with challenge rather than consensus, you stop reading friction as a character flaw and start reading it as a communication pattern. That shift alone prevents a remarkable amount of unnecessary damage. I’m an INTJ, 8w9, high D and high I on DISC, which means I have strong opinions, move fast, and have had to learn (repeatedly) that not everyone wants to operate at my pace. Knowing that about myself makes me a better partner.
The through line between how we run the firm and how we advise clients is this: relationships don’t maintain themselves. They require the same intentionality as any other system you want to hold up under pressure.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.implementlegal.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/devosdevine/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-de-vos-devine/
Image Credits
Chelsea Lane