Maria C. Rodriguez

Since moving to McDermott last year, Rodriguez has continued to build her multi-faceted employment practice. She advises and represents clients from a wide assortment of fields, from airlines in South America to sports agencies in California.

"There's so much variety," Rodriguez said. "We get to help people have good employment relationships. We're training managers and executives. We're giving advice and counsel on major policy and practice issues. We're dealing with labor issues. I love it."

Recently, Rodriguez won a federal court case against two sports agents who claimed their former employer, Octagon, was not entitled to "fee tails," ongoing percentages of fees the agents earned after leaving the agency.

A standard industry practice, "fee tails" are fee-sharing provisions agents enter into with agencies in return for retaining exclusive rights to negotiate on behalf of players and drawing a salary from the agency.

The agents alleged the provisions in their contracts were an illegal restrictive covenant and would keep them from finding a job. Hendrickson v. Octagon Inc., 14-CV01416 (N.D. Cal., filed Mar. 27, 2014).

"Ironically, they went right over to work at Relativity Sports, a competitor of ours," said Rodriguez.

U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer of San Francisco agreed, holding the fee tails were a means for agencies to recoup their investment on an agent's courting of a client after the agent leaves with the client.

"It's not about, 'You can't go work somewhere else.' You can go work somewhere else. You just have to pay back some of the money that we invested in you," Rodriguez said. "Contractually, the player is required to pay you, not the agency. The agencies would crumble if these provisions were not enforceable."

Another part of Rodriguez's practice involves industry-wide training on sexual harassment in entertainment and production. Using a combination of live and video training, Rodriguez illustrates the idea of anti-harassment practices by talking about creating a safe work environment.

"In the movie business safety is critical," she said. "We made it very clear that this is part of safety and people need to feel safe at work. That means people have to be respectful, keep it about the job."

So far, Rodriguez has provided the anti-harassment training to more than 40,000 entertainment company workers, including Paramount and Warner Bros.

"We're trying to stop it," Rodriguez said of harassment. "We're really trying to make a culture change now."

-- Glenn Jeffers