Ted Johnson Senior EditorBertram “Bert” Fields, the larger-than-life entertainment lawyer whose roster of star clients and studios spoke to a penchant for doling out legal threats with a rhetorical flourish, along with a capacity for winning lucrative settlements, has died at his Malibu home, his rep confirmed to Variety.
He was 93.Fields thrived on the notion that he never lost a trial, and even if the Perry Mason-like reputation wasn’t exactly true, he was a relentless litigator who defined some of the industry’s most heralded cases of the 1980s and ’90s, with clients that included Warren Beatty, Tom Cruise, the Beatles, Edward G.
Robinson, Michael Jackson, Rupert Murdoch and, at one time or another, just about all of the major studios. Defining his technique as akin to going into military battle, Fields told the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta in 2006, “If I were a general, I would attack, and keep pressing the attack, to throw the opponent off balance, to change the odds and make a settlement your way much more favorable.”When Jeffrey Katzenberg sued the Walt Disney Co.
and the case went to trial in 1999, Fields pressed the company’s chairman-CEO Michael Eisner on his reference to his former lieutenant as “that little midget.” Eisner called Fields’ line of questioning “ill-advised,” but the mogul’s prickly testimony seemed to tarnish Disney, and the studio soon settled, reportedly for the hefty sum of $250 million.Speaking of the case to Variety in July 2012, Katzenberg said: “There was the proverbial smoking gun.
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