Steve and Katie talk with fellow art lawyer Maggie Hoag about her journey from art to law and then to art law, including her transition from private practice to a long career as a top lawyer at Christie’s in New York. They discuss the nature of legal work at a major auction house and how the practice and industry has changed over time.
Resources
https://www.vanguardlawmag.com/case-studies/margaret-maggie-j-hoag-christies/
Katie and Steve discuss topics based on news and magazine articles and court filings and not based on original research unless specifically noted.
Episode Transcription
Steve Schindler: Hi, I’m Steve Schindler.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I’m Katie Wilson-Milne.
Steve Schindler: Welcome to The Art Law Podcast, a monthly podcast exploring the places where art intersects with and interferes with the law.
Katie Wilson-Milne: The Art Law Podcast is sponsored by the law firm of Schindler Cohen & Hochman LLP, a premier litigation and art law boutique in New York City. Hi, Steve.
Steve Schindler: Hi, Katie. How have you been?
Katie Wilson-Milne: I’m fine, but it’s auction season.
Steve Schindler: I know.
Katie Wilson-Milne: We’re getting up to it. So we have a fitting podcast planned today.
Steve Schindler: Who’s joining us?
Katie Wilson-Milne: We have our friend and longtime fellow art lawyer Maggie Hoag. Maggie is the Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Christie’s, and she’s been there since 2011, so she’s been doing this a really long time. And we’re going to talk to Maggie today about what it’s like to be a lawyer at an auction house, what it’s like to transition out of private practice into that field, and also the various legal issues that come up in the high-end auction world.
Steve Schindler: Right. And I have one question before we get there for Maggie, because I know that you’re a graduate of Stanford Law School and that you studied there with one John Henry Merryman, and Katie and I just did a podcast on the release of the new version of his original book. I’m just wondering what it was like to study with him.
Maggie Hoag: Well, I listened to it, your podcast, and I loved what Simon and Stephen had to say about John. He was the reason, I think, that I went to law school. So, I didn’t want to be a lawyer, but I found out that there was this man who’d written the tome on art law. So that’s where I ended up studying law.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And how did you find that out? I mean, maybe, let’s just segue into how did you become interested in this field?
Maggie Hoag: Well, I was an intern at Christie’s in Chicago, and I was a Jack of all trades there. Right after college— I went to Vanderbilt and was an art history major, along with French, Italian, and African American studies. So those are not…
Steve Schindler: Wow.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Variety of interests. I was also an African American studies…
Maggie Hoag: And then…
Katie Wilson-Milne: …double major. Interesting.
Maggie Hoag: You know, looking for what to do next. So I found Christie’s Chicago office, and at the time, they were still doing exhibitions. It was still a tour location, like LA now is for Christie’s. Sometimes we do have special things, go to Chicago now. But at the time, it was really active. But my parents didn’t really love that it was an unpaid internship. And so after six months, I had to find something to do. I found a job and then I wanted to go to graduate school, business school. But they wanted, you know, six years of experience at the time. They were getting flooded. Looked at law school, focused on New York, thinking art and law.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So your first interest was art. Art.
Maggie Hoag: Always art.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And where did that come from?
Maggie Hoag: I think with art history and architecture studies, I realized I wasn’t a creator. I thought I could be an architect. My father would not let me be an engineer, because he was an engineer in college, and he wanted me to have a more well-rounded experience. So that was off the table, and Vanderbilt didn’t really have an architecture program anyway, but they had something art history related, where you’re really focused on architecture. I loved it, but I couldn’t be— I wasn’t a creator. I am terrible about asking people for money, so I couldn’t be like a development director at a museum.
Katie Wilson-Milne: No.
Maggie Hoag: So curatorial development, all off the table.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Non-profit work, not gonna work.
Maggie Hoag: Grant writing, such a specific skill, I don’t think I have that.
Steve Schindler: Teaching art history, was that an option?
Maggie Hoag: Teaching art history was probably an option, but I was really business-focused and met some influential women in the trust and estates realm at Christie’s who were cultivating relationships with financial advisors and lawyers. And all of a sudden I realized, oh, there are these lawyers who are looking after giant art collections and mainly tax and trust and estate state. But at the same time, there was art involved. So I thought, hmm, maybe I should start looking at law school instead of business school, and focusing on NYU and Columbia, thinking, oh, they’re the two that are going to have an art law program.
Steve Schindler: Right.
Maggie Hoag: They didn’t really.
Steve Schindler: They didn’t, I know.
Maggie Hoag: No. I mean, at the time, maybe a guest lecture or a speaking lunch. But then I looked at Stanford and I thought, oh my gosh, could I ever get into Stanford Law School? And I got waitlisted and I called the office and I said, I really want to study under John Henry Maryman.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Ah, that’s a great lesson.
Maggie Hoag: And with that specific reason, they knew that I wasn’t going to be accepted and then say “no thanks,” which I think schools hate for their attrition rates. And I got in and I immediately e-mailed him and he said, well, you can’t take my course until your 2L year. I said, okay, but let’s forge a relationship. And we did from the get-go, from the first year.
Steve Schindler: That’s very bold. I admire that.
Maggie Hoag: And at the time he was teaching his class, it was before Simon Frankel and Adine Varah came in.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And what was it like to study with him and know him? Because you’re right. I mean, we think now at least NYU, Columbia, the other New York schools really have the most well-known art law activity, right?
Maggie Hoag: Brooklyn Law School.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Whether it’s professors, but also student activity. And that has not always been the case.
Maggie Hoag: No. I mean, I think that your podcast with the authors did him justice. He was very opinionated. He knew what he thought was the right position. But he had openness for all of us to bring our own thoughts to the classroom. And the class was at night, and he always brought a bottle or two of wine from Trader Joes.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Oh, wow.
Steve Schindler: Wow, that’s great to know.
Maggie Hoag: And to loosen all of us up, I suppose, to have some good debates. And he was my sponsor. So I ended up doing externships during the summers, but the most important one being he sponsored me to not take classes my last year of law school and instead be an extern at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office.
Steve Schindler: Wow.
Maggie Hoag: Right. Under Adine.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Which, for our listeners, is a unique structure in that San Francisco is affiliated with many museums and their in-house legal work, in air quotes, is at the city attorney’s office. So they have a little art museum department there.
Maggie Hoag: That’s right. And it’s such a variety of different museums. So you’re really seeing fine art, but you’re seeing artifacts. You’re seeing interesting museums like the de Young Museum that sits in Golden Gate Park. It’s just interesting, strange work— from working with boards to acquiring, deaccessioning work, and real estate and construction. Because at the time I was there, they were constructing some museums and going through renovation. So I learned a lot about bonds.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, that’s great training to be an in-house lawyer.
Maggie Hoag: Completely.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, which you’re not going to get once you’re in private practice. Being forced to specialize.
Maggie Hoag: No one’s going to train you with that variety of work.
Steve Schindler: Right. Because you were in private practice for a number of years at Hughes Hubbard. And I’m just wondering, maybe you can reflect a little bit on— you know, because you practiced art law there to some extent, right? You’ve represented museums and how that— how does that contrast with the kind of in-house work that you’re doing now? What did you learn there that is different?
Maggie Hoag: Well, I chose Hughes Hubbard similarly to law school. And when I asked law firms, “do you do art law?” They always say yes. They’re trying to recruit.
Katie Wilson-Milne: The big law firms that will hire out of law school, which is also a limited set.
Maggie Hoag: Right. And it’s not necessarily true. They may have one case, a litigation, that they’ve done in the past, and that allows them to say that yes.
Katie Wilson-Milne: That four people can work on.
Maggie Hoag: Correct.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah.
Maggie Hoag: And Hughes Hubbard did have a practice with two partners who were pretty-knee deep in some really interesting artist, gallery, auction house issues. And you weren’t allowed to do art law full time. I mean, you two are so fortunate that you do.
Katie Wilson-Milne: But it has all the same struggles. I mean, it would be unworkable for a big firm, because there wouldn’t be money.
Maggie Hoag: Correct. And so I had to do something. And I also needed training to be a good lawyer. So I took up pharmaceutical litigation. I was assigned to pharmaceutical litigation. But nights and weekends were art law.
Katie Wilson-Milne: With the knowledge that there would be plenty of pro bono work or that if an art law project came along that was paid, you would be— they knew you would want to do it.
Maggie Hoag: Pro bono work was essential. So, Hughes Hubbard worked with a variety of museums, and that’s where I thought my focus would be. Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, museums with no in-house council, where they are looking to us to make legal and business decisions, which as outside council, you don’t normally get so much of the business-judgment-type work, but that was very important to form my training of feeling good about making sometimes-gut-decisions, because as you both have explored on this podcast, there’s usually not a law that we can point to, and so it’s about guiding the client to make the less risky decision. As outside council on the billable hours with litigation, you know, I was the junior for the first three years where I didn’t get that big picture, but I did get a great training to realize, okay, there is law. You have to look at the law, and you have to write a memo to the client explaining the law and let the client make the decision based on their risk tolerance. So I got to see two sides of that coin.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And also what can go wrong. I mean, that’s why I think— counter to what the market says— for lawyers, I think being a litigator to start, which I was too at a big firm, is great training to be a generalist, right? There’s no other way to be able to look at all sorts of contracts and documents critically and anticipate what issues might come up, I think, than that kind of training. So it makes a lot of sense.
Maggie Hoag: I think that’s right. I feel like when I started thinking about leaving law firm life, so many museums said, “but you’re a litigator.”
Katie Wilson-Milne: I know.
Steve Schindler: Yeah.
Maggie Hoag: You and I had…
Katie Wilson-Milne: Well, we met many moons ago talking about this, right before you left Hughes Hubbard, yeah.
Maggie Hoag: And they would say, you don’t have transactional experience. And I said, but I do. I mean, I’ve been working with these museums writing their governance policies for the last six and a half years. I’ve been helping them out of strange situations, like shooting off fireworks in a park, that you do through helpful negotiations with the park commissioner. That’s not litigation. This is about relationships, and this is true in-house work. And some of them believed me. I did a secondment at the Guggenheim for maybe seven months, which I feel like their team thought, oh, because some of them came from litigation backgrounds. And they were the ones to say, no, you can do this. You’ll figure it out. And if you were an employment council looking for an in-house job, you’re probably going to be pigeonholed into an employment law position.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, but you’ll get a job.
Maggie Hoag: You will. You shouldn’t feel that way as a litigator to transactional.
Steve Schindler: Right. And I think one of the things, because I mean, I spent the first half of my career just as doing litigation before I started doing art-related projects. And I think as a litigator, you have the perspective of everything that went wrong. And that’s really always your perspective. And in some ways, I remember thinking so many times, like, how could these transactional people have done that?
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah.
Steve Schindler: That’s so crazy. But, of course, then when you’re in that position and you’re trying to make a deal happen, you realize that people sometimes do things that later sort of blow up. But I think it’s a great training ground.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I just, I do think now that we work on so many different types of projects and so many transactional projects, it’s interesting to work with different types of lawyers, right? You work with litigators, you work with tax lawyers, you work with trust and estate lawyers, and everybody has a different risk tolerance. They think about different windows of what’s going on, and that’s been really interesting, but I do still feel that starting out as a litigator gives you the biggest window.
Maggie Hoag: I agree with one caveat. I think that as someone who has a growing team, that when a litigator comes in who we hire for a transactional role, we have to make sure that they understand it’s no longer black and white, it’s no longer about pointing out the risks.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, it’s hard.
Maggie Hoag: You have to take the next step, and you’re going to be living in gray. And gray can be very difficult for someone who’s more meant to do trial work.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I think that’s 100% right, and even though Steve and I are in private practice, because of the nature of a lot of what we do being so generalist and being clients only lawyers, we also have to think like that, which has taken adjustment. But part of that, I think, is the transition between being in a law firm and being in-house, right?
Maggie Hoag: I think that’s right.
Steve Schindler: Yeah, and I think it’s also a transition, I think, between being in a big law firm, which we all were, and then being in a smaller kind of law firm like this, where we are sometimes the only counsel to a client that doesn’t have a lot of experience with lawyers. But big law firms, and even now more than when I was there, are so specialized and so just tight about what you can and can’t do. And you’re slotted into things, and then thinking outside of those things is really just not an option. And then you come to an environment like in-house or small firm and you’re just getting a lot more questions that seem out of your comfort zone to start, but then you start to try to acclimate to that.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, and you realize you do the best you can with a lot of varied questions and clients who don’t want to spend every last cent for you to get it perfect. And in a world, like you said, Maggie, where there’s not perfect.
Maggie Hoag: Yeah, you don’t get things done perfectly, and you don’t get everything done during the day, and you do get asked the strangest questions. And everybody thinks that because you’re a lawyer, you know absolutely everything about the law and that you’re going to recite off some law. I mean, I know nothing about tax. I should know more.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Which was going to come up all the time in the art world.
Maggie Hoag: Fully. And you have to learn your general. I always say I’m sort of like the country doctor, where my specialty is, of course, transactions and negotiations. But yes, I’m called in to advise on our litigations by our disputes council. And yes, I need to know about compliance and tax and how estates work. So I know a little bit of a lot of things.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Just enough, yeah,
Maggie Hoag: But not from books anymore.
Steve Schindler: Right. It’s funny though, because you’re the deputy general counsel at a very sophisticated, well worldwide organization, right? And to think of yourself as a country doctor seems sort of a funny analogy.
Katie Wilson-Milne: But I do think, you know, if we weren’t, doing this type of work for the last decade plus has made me think about some alternative life in which I would have hung up a shingle in a small town and kind of loved it, right? Because of just dealing with so many varied issues that people just need help with from time to time and figuring it out. So you don’t end up going to work at a museum, you instead go to a major for-profit institution, Christie’s, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about that decision and then what you were doing when you started.
Maggie Hoag: I thought really hard about it. I realized going from private practice to a museum would have been a fine move, but I was still sort of amped up at the time. I felt like I hadn’t reached a point where I wanted to be at a slow pace. And I mean no disrespect to museums, but having worked with them and at them, you do have more time than you do in the auction world, which is seasonal. There are auctions year round. We think about May and November, but it’s ongoing. The online auction is ongoing. Everything has its own deadline. And I liked that pace so much. But I wasn’t looking to work at Christie’s. I was just friends with the General Counsel at the time. She was a guest lecturer at Brooklyn Law School when I was teaching the art law seminar there. And I was friends with the former General Counsel as well. But then when this one replaced her, she and I started having sort of quarterly lunches, like sort of meeting like you and I did back in the day.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah.
Maggie Hoag: And at one of the lunches, she pretty much dropped a job in my lap. And before I knew it, I had accepted without asking what the position was or how much it paid or any of those kind of questions. But there I was and there I go. And so a week and a half later, I left Hughes Hubbard and went to Christie’s.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Great. And that was in 2011.
Maggie Hoag: 2011.
Katie Wilson-Milne: That is wild, Maggie, that we… Wow, how much time has passed.
Maggie Hoag: I know.
Katie Wilson-Milne: That’s crazy. Okay, well, what is the legal department at Christie’s like? And I guess you could tell us if it’s changed over that period of time, too. But how is it organized? You know, how many people are there?
Maggie Hoag: Sure. So, you know, it’s global, first of all. But as far as New York, I run the transactional team. There are five of us. And then there’s a compliance lawyer and a compliance analyst, a disputes lawyer and a paralegal— and transactional has a great paralegal as well. And then at the helm of all of it is our general counsel, Jason Pollack. We also have Risk Incorporated. So we have the head of Risk in New York. Then in London, there’s similar structures. They have a few more corporate lawyers who— because of the corporate structure and being based in London, you need those people. They don’t work on the deals and the art to most degrees. But they have similar counterparts to all of us. And then there are lawyers in Paris and Hong Kong and one who works in mainland China.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And to what extent do you know the lawyers around the world?
Maggie Hoag: All of them.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Do you feel like a team?
Maggie Hoag: I mean, very much so.
Katie Wilson-Milne: That’s quite cool.
Maggie Hoag: It’s really cool. I mean, we have so many meetings. We have offsites every once in a while. And I mean, most of the consignments that come in for me are going to be multi-jurisdiction. So, I’m working with my counterparts in London and Hong Kong and Paris all the time. It’s a very cohesive team. It’s a very women-centric team.
Katie Wilson-Milne: As many auction house teams are.
Maggie Hoag: Correct. But my team in New York is very tight, and we work in such great parallel with one another.
Steve Schindler: Great. And you mentioned risk before. Could you just explain for our listeners, what is the difference between risk and the legal function? What do they do?
Maggie Hoag: So, I feel like every auction house is set up a little bit differently. So, I’ll do risk and then I’ll touch on compliance. Because for us, risk is insurance. And so, we have a global risk manager who makes sure that we are insured, Christie’s, with a fine arts policy, as well as general liability, workers comp, everything else that any company needs. And then, how we can extend that insurance to any of our consignors to cover their fine art while it’s under our custody and control. We can’t insure our clients. This is a New York state issue. Because then we’d be insurance brokers. So, instead, we extend loss damage liability to the artwork. Compliance for Christie’s is really focused on AML, sanctions, knee deep, of course, in tariffs now. Whereas, compliance at our competitors can sometimes cover cultural property and CITES, which is about animal and plant species, as well. Whereas, our transactional lawyers are meant to cover those, because we’re split up by the specialist departments that we cover. So, if you’re covering English furniture, you better know about rosewood and ivory.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So, in your transactional team at Christie’s, each of you, or maybe the four people that are right under you, are assigned different departments, and they’re the main lawyer for those departments.
Maggie Hoag: Exactly. And I’ve shifted around. I’ve worked with almost every specialist department at Christie’s. I always joke with a very good friend of mine, who’s general counsel at Phillips, that when I came to Christie’s, he wrote a list of things he didn’t want to do anymore and handed them to the newbie, which was me. But it made me sure learn a lot. I don’t like people to only know about one thing. So I think it’s really important that we all have the same knowledge base, so that when you, Katie, are out, and you normally look after the Asian art department, someone else knows how to cover the issues.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right. Yeah.
Maggie Hoag: It doesn’t work if the knowledge sits with one person. So over time, I don’t really cover any art departments anymore. I manage the lawyers who do, and then I work with the large collections, mostly springing from 20th and 21st century. But you never know. I mean, sometimes you have something like Ann and Gordon Getty that was so dec arts heavy, but that would have been mine.
Katie Wilson-Milne: It was a major collection, yeah.
Maggie Hoag: So it’s sort of, at the same time, I need to still know about all of the issues that are going to be involved when you’re selling decorative arts.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I think one thing we want to talk to you about, which is always an issue when you move in house as a lawyer, you come from being the profit center of an operation to being the cost center of an operation, and not driving the show in the same way. And that obviously could be an intellectual and emotional adjustment. But also how we think about our clients. For Steve and I, it’s so clear who our clients are. They hire us in a very transparent process. We can send them a bill. They pay us, hopefully. It’s a mostly very clear relationship. How do you interact with your, I’m air quoting, clients at Christie’s? And I guess one thing I’m getting at is just how well integrated are you? Is there sort of a divide between the business people that are making all the money and the good things happen and the legal department that’s just sometimes brought in, or are you really integrated in a way that you’re doing more than just the legal work?
Maggie Hoag: And I’ll give you the legal answer, it depends. So, I do think it’s emotional to be the ones driving up costs. I mean, support staff was something I wasn’t used to being referred to. Or legal, just in general, like no longer having my own name. And I would say, I’m Maggie— “oh, legal says,” I’m like, I’m the only lawyer on the call.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Hey, I’m here.
Maggie Hoag: The clients, yes, my internal clients, they’re my business-getters, they’re my fellow execs, they’re the specialists. They might be a coordinator who’s looking to be an art specialist, who’s right out of college. So my client might be 23 years old. I feel as if I’m fully integrated. I think that has changed though since I joined. I feel like when I first came, there might have been a bigger divide. And while we did take on different departments, you were the lawyer for that department. I feel like now we are involved in helping to guide risk and business decisions, and we’re trusted advisors.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And how did you do that? Because I think one thing Steve and I have seen, not at Christie’s, but— and I’m sure this differs at all the auction houses too, right, how well their legal team is integrated in the business decisions. But it’s not uncommon, and this could be at a museum too, for the in-house lawyer to be the last person to know about something that’s been percolating for a while. And that can be so frustrating, right?
Maggie Hoag: So frustrating.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Like, I could have been helpful from the beginning, we could have saved all this time, we saved this money. But I think that’s a common issue that can come up. So how do you build a culture within a business like Christie’s where that is less— happening less?
Maggie Hoag: I think your lawyers have to be, and your financial people, whoever it is, your art handlers, you have to be interested in what the company is doing. I am an art history major. So are a few people on my legal team. We love art. We want to be there at the unveiling of something coming up on the loading dock.
Steve Schindler: Right.
Maggie Hoag: Once the specialists see that that’s your passion, too, you just didn’t become a specialist. You instead went to law school. There is a trust there. On the other side, for my lawyers who have no experience in art, it’s just showing that you know what you’re doing. And giving the comfort that you’re a safe space to come talk to, and being visible and not sitting in some proverbial ivory tower away from everything. And instead, you walk around at Christie’s, your arm gets pulled into an office. I mean, it’s the best thing to do that I encourage my team. Be visible. Go to meetings, even if you’re not truly invited, but if they’re needed, yeah, but go learn.
Steve Schindler: I wish we could do that sometimes. Go to the meetings with our clients when they’re talking about something.
Maggie Hoag: You can shadow me sometimes.
Katie Wilson-Milne: That would be a dream.
Steve Schindler: No, it’s great, because I mean, I think even outside lawyers have similar experiences, analogous perhaps, but you know, when-
Katie Wilson-Milne: Because we’re in the generalist…
Steve Schindler: Yeah, and also clients, you know, who maybe, you know, should have, would have been better to have told you about something earlier on rather than at the end of the day. But I think that’s sometimes the nature of people doing business.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I mean, there’s a cultural component in the art world, and that’s what we’re curious about your take on this too, Maggie, if this is as true in the major auction houses. But certainly because we were with a slew of different clients of different levels of sophistication, including in the gallery world, it’s still just really true, even at major galleries, small galleries, medium galleries, major galleries, that there is not a culture of papering what’s happening, there’s not a culture of risk assessment. And so there’s just no, there’s no even structure in which a lawyer could be integrated well. And I have sympathy for that. I mean, there’s just sort of ignorance about how that would even work, and no point person there. So all the time we’re seeing contracts drafted by some intern at the reception desk that they found online, or that some lawyer we all know drafted 10 years ago.
Steve Schindler: Or signed by them, that’s even worse sometimes.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yes. Thinking about this practice, that’s always something I think, okay, that’s definitely changing now, right? This big thing happened. People aren’t going to let this happen again. And it doesn’t really change.
Maggie Hoag: It doesn’t really change.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And I think you probably see that on your client’s clients, right? They’re dealing with a level of informality and trying to find paperwork and assess risk. But I wonder does that pervade the auction house as well? Because of course people from Christie’s or Sotheby’s or Phillips may have worked in galleries. They may have been in different positions all over the art world and also learned that kind of norm.
Maggie Hoag: And my client’s clients are my clients, and I feel like sometimes they act like or they respond to me as if I’m inundating them with paper, because they’re not used to paper. In your episode about resale restrictions, we see those boilerplate typed-out things that look like they might have existed from 20 years ago and are just being cranked out as the second page of an invoice without any thought to it, which, okay, now you have paper, but your paper is very strange, like that— your paper doesn’t work for you, and they’re not— you wish that they could get the pro bono help that the museums get, but they’re a for-profit center, and so I think most law firms are not looking maybe at a discounted fee rate, but they’re not getting counsel on things, and they are having interns or taking what they see from one place and adopting it as theirs, even though it doesn’t fit with their culture or their way of doing business. So we do have to train, especially anyone coming from those types of internships who are the coordinators of our departments. We have to train them that paper is not a bad thing. Everything is going to be under consignment agreement. In fact, if we’re taking custody of things, most clients are looking for paperwork that shows that Christie’s is going to take care of it and be liable for damage to things. And on the flip side, we need paper from you, clients. We need to show how you acquired it or how you purchased the work in the first place, and you need to dig sometimes, I mean, get into the cultural property sector. You need to be digging for paper. We can tell you what to look out for, but it’s a paper culture, whether you like it or not, because we’re a sophisticated auction house, as are our competitors, and we need to make sure that we’re covering our clients. We are acting as a fiduciary to those clients.
Katie Wilson-Milne: But unlike a publishing house or, like, I think the music industry, you have this cultural collision between what you’re expecting as an auction house and the way the rest of the fine art market works, whereas we have these sister industries, these entertainment industries, where people, they’re used to contracts. Every musician has a contract. It’s not weird. They get it. They understand licensing. So it really is, I think, a unique challenge and that you are the sort of formal adult player in this market, but everyone else has different expectations.
Maggie Hoag: Fortunately, we work with attorneys like the two of you who make our clients know what we need to do to make things proper. And it does feel like it’s coming up less and less, but you’re right to highlight galleries and sometimes the long-term family who has the family attorney, and they always are sort of shocked and surprised at getting the consignment agreement.
Steve Schindler: Yeah. I think what’s so interesting always to me about what I imagine being a lawyer for an auction house would be is that you have your clients who have been talking about: specialists, the auction house itself. But as you mentioned, the auction house is acting as a fiduciary to all of the people who and institutions who are consigning works of art to you. So there’s this sort of double-client thing going on, which is that you are a lawyer to Christie’s, but Christie’s also has a very special relationship to everyone who consigns work. And so how do you navigate that?
Maggie Hoag: I think as much as I can, I want to have some sort of direct link to the ultimate client, to the seller. So I’m fine with any of my specialists joining me on a call. But to iron out issues, it very much helps to talk to the underlying client and not be playing the telephone game, because then you’re seen as legal with the capital L and you’re blocking something when really I’m just trying to find a solution. So the more that we do in collaboration, the better, which goes back to that trust point of forming the relationship with your internal clients. So they know that you’re not going to be a complete idiot when you get on the phone with someone who they’ve worked with forever. But at the same time, I’m not looking to steal their clients. So sometimes it’s more that in the old culture, there was this feeling of mine, mine, mine, this is my pot. And that’s changed a lot to be like we are a group, we are all working together, and we need a team behind us. So at this point, I’ll get on calls with lawyers, of course, but financial advisors. And I’ll bring a specialist if they want to, and normally they don’t, because they’re going to find it really boring. But I will bring our finance person, our commercial director, onto the call, because if there’s questions about the actual mechanics of the deal, why not do that all at once? And getting rid of that sort of piecemeal negotiation and the misinterpretation that happens when you don’t have that direct link is essential.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Have you felt like over your time there, you’ve been more welcome in those spaces than perhaps was typical when you started?
Maggie Hoag: I think definitely, and I see it happen with my more junior attorneys as well, that they’re also more welcome. I can say they’re all women, and they all are much more integrated into the business than it was when I started. But I feel like that took effort on the legal side of things, and it took effort on the commercial side of things. But overall, the company has just become cohesive, and I feel like we have a real benefit in people having been in their roles, or at least growing into their roles, and being homegrown. And that’s helped a lot, because we’ve all grown up with each other, in a sense.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, which may not be true in many other comparable spaces.
Maggie Hoag: I will not speak.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s just the nature of any big business, right, that can happen. So we talked about your internal clients, but even within Christie’s, I would imagine different specialists dealing with different levels of external clients are going to have different risk tolerances, right? So you might be instructed or sort of understand that whatever legal risks you present are going to be worth it for a certain level of a consignment and maybe not worth it for others. So how do you differentiate that? I mean, how do you figure out with your different business teams what level of risk they’re receptive to and sort of how to present that and also back off?
Maggie Hoag: I think, I mean, you’re right that it depends a lot on value and a lot on desirability of what’s being consigned. Where I see it the most is when we present trainings that have to be trainings across the company. And you’re training a group who have no idea that something that we’re training on would even be tolerated because that’s not at all the way that they would do their formal business. So they would say, no way. If the client asks something, but they don’t know that their counterparts would say, “maybe, let’s get legal involved.” Then are you putting ideas in their head? Then you start walking back and thinking, oh, if you don’t need to do it that way, don’t do it that way. But yes, it’s very different risk tolerances, but every specialist department has their own bizarre issues to confront. With 2021, you have some of our most sophisticated repeat clients, and you’re doing the guarantees that you two have spoken about before, and you’re finding a third party to back off the guarantee risk, and all of that is normal parlance for those departments. And that’s matriculated into different departments at this point, but it started with that group. But if they say, well, we have so many things to follow and so many risks, and we have to go to legal on all of this, and they complain, well, okay, Antiquities has its entire own set of issues to confront before they sell anything, every single lot having to be vetted. And separately, in the design space, with authentication, attribution, going to the different authenticating boards, plus design deals with furniture, so you have all of those CITES issues coming up with what is the furniture made of. So, everybody has their own issues to confront. And sometimes that’s a good message to remind my colleagues of.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right, that your risk tolerance is going to be tailored to the type of material you deal with.
Maggie Hoag: Because sometimes it’s a hard and fast law. Like sometimes it’s an Egyptian piece and we don’t have the proper documentation to get us to the date where we need to go. That’s a law. Other times it’s lets you and I hold hands and make a business decision that we can tolerate commercially, and then I can pass through our disputes council and make sure that if in two years she’s hearing about it, she’s not very angry at me.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, she’s not surprised. She knows you thought it through.
Steve Schindler: In terms of what you just said, how much of what you do and advise turns on sort of reputational issues or public relations concerns as opposed to strictly speaking a law, right? There’s an Egyptian law that says you need this documentation, and that’s one thing. But what does it go further than that in terms of like worrying about the reputation of the auction house apart from what the black letter law is?
Maggie Hoag: I think hugely so. And so I would say in addition to specialists, business getters, execs being my clients, I should have said, I work in direct communication with our communications department, with our marketing department. They are going to have solid opinions about what we can do. And they come from past experiences really well-versed in knowing what could land us in hot water, which has nothing to do with the law, but that we need to be careful about. Reputational issues gone wrong are good teaching lessons. And we have learned from them to the point where we have a special committee to review certain things. And we do have a lawyer on it, but I’m on it, but I’m not usually espousing a legal opinion at all. It’s sort of just, as a group, are we okay corporately wading into these waters?
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, I guess on that note too, are you generally part of business decision-making teams? I mean, how much of your job is non-legal to the extent that’s the case?
Maggie Hoag: It’s a lot, I mean, nowadays it’s— I don’t do that much that’s legal, other than negotiating the agreement. But before that, it’s about the pitch, the presentation, working through the marketing, figuring out authentication provenance risks that gets a little bit legal, but you’re still working with the specialist team, sitting while we determine the commercial deal.
Katie Wilson-Milne: That’s really fun.
Maggie Hoag: I mean, this is the part I love, and my legal department always probably feels like they’re tugging my arm to keep me one foot still in legal, but I love that part of it.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah. So what makes you a successful in-house lawyer, at least at an auction house? What are the skills that make someone thrive in that position, or made you thrive?
Maggie Hoag: I think, touching on knowing the perfection point that you made earlier, you’re coming from a law firm where you’re meant to be perfect at a big firm. You’re handing your work over to the mid-level attorney, and it goes up and up and up, and it gets added to along the way. Your part better be very good, and you better have spent a lot of hours on it. We don’t have a lot of hours to spend on anything, and we’re not meant to be working around the clock, because it’s not billable. And I won’t knock Christie’s, but I just will say the salary is a bit different from private practice.
Katie Wilson-Milne: It’s not useful, though.
Maggie Hoag: It’s not, and you have to leave things on your desk for the next day. But most important, you have to be prioritizing what’s on your desk, because some things, whether it’s by value or whether it’s more of an operations-type issue that could be solved by business people, just figuring out how to triage and assign things where they can be assigned to get done. So do I need to be looking at a contract for our Canon printer? That’s probably not the best use of my time.
Katie Wilson-Milne: That’s a great example, yeah.
Maggie Hoag: But do I have an intern who could just look and look at the indemnification clause, make a snap decision about whether it looks okay? That’s a good use of their time.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And that’s a sign of your own risk assessment, right? Obviously, you’re making a calculus, because you can’t do everything. What level of risk you can tolerate for what type of contract?
Maggie Hoag: The other part of success, I think, is flagging issues. Like my attorney’s flagging issues to me or me flagging issues to our general counsel early on. Just mentioning that it might be coming up instead of anyone being surprised. And same thing with our president of Christie’s and our CEO. Our CEO was our former president, before that she was part of our trust and estates group for years. She’s very involved in all of our decisions. If something goes awry and she doesn’t know about it, that’s a failure on my part for not having spoken about it ever. So not crying wolf, but at the same time, just mentioning, memorializing.
Steve Schindler: Right, that’s a hard line to walk sometimes.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Also with busy people, you know, like how do you find the time to tell them about all these possible issues and in deciding which ones are really worth the time? Are there things in particular about— other things in particular about moving from private practice to the auction house that in the beginning, in those first years, were the most jarring, or that took the longest to get used to?
Maggie Hoag: Well, I really was excited about having these things called Saturdays and Sundays.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, that’s good. They were really great. Let’s start with the positives.
Maggie Hoag: Now, it’s flipped back sometimes where I don’t get those anymore just because of the nature of the job, but I was completely jarred by that. It was so strange to leave with the sun still out and to know that I could go out for dinner. I mean, it sounds so silly, but… And then the tracking of hours. All I do all day is shift and shift and shift and shift to various things. I need to work from home for a day if I have to concentrate on a project, just so I don’t have the barging in, do-you-have-five-minutes-type thing. And we’re very much open-door policy as a legal department. We want to have people popping by. As I said, we need to be walking around and sort of seeing what’s happening out there. So all of that was different. I think also it’s a little lonelier, because you don’t have a large group of colleagues to bounce things off of. I think about being the lone council at a museum. I think I would not be happy with that.
Steve Schindler: Right.
Maggie Hoag: Because chit-chatting, at least with even my small group about things, is essential. But you need the right colleagues too, because you have to trust everybody. So hiring other lawyers— I was always involved with recruitment at my law firm. Now I’m the recruiter. I mean, and it’s making sure you have the right fit. And if you don’t have the right fit, making sure you make a quick decision that it’s not the right fit, because the team is too small to not all be happy with one another.
Steve Schindler: I think that’s true of a small law firm, too. I mean, it’s very, you don’t have room for people who are sort of difficult to get along with or, you know, don’t really fit in with your sort of culture. Can we just talk a little bit about just some of the specific types of legal issues that you confront in an auction or big auction? So now we’re heading right into the fall auction season. It’s great that you’re here having this calm conversation with us, because I know that you’ve got a lot on your plate. What are the types of legal issues that you confront in a typical auction?
Maggie Hoag: I always say I love pressure, so I really like to be calm, even though things are probably going crazy on my phone right now. But it’s a good…
Katie Wilson-Milne: This is where you thrive.
Maggie Hoag: In-house counsel, calmness is essential. You did a whole episode, it was a short episode, when the New York City auction regulations went away.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah.
Steve Schindler: Oh yeah, that was a crazy time.
Maggie Hoag: It was crazy. And you were at our trust and estates like preview breakfast.
Steve Schindler: That’s how we found out.
Maggie Hoag: Yeah, I think that’s how I found out. We didn’t know this either. So all of a sudden, those disappear overnight. And yet we want to be upfront about disclosure. So this time of year, we’re finalizing the last deals of the season. We don’t have formal catalog deadlines anymore, so there’s no print. We’re going— it used to be, we’re going to print…
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right, I remember that.
Maggie Hoag: On October 20th, and then you knew that October 21st was going to be the best day of the whole year, because no one could do anything.
Katie Wilson-Milne: It was over.
Maggie Hoag: It was over. We don’t do that anymore. Everything is online. We still have catalogs, of course, but it’s just not that formal deadline, and things are a little bit more moving and shifting. So what’s going on right now is we’ve announced several large collections. The works are touring all over. You might be looking at the weather to make sure that the tour locations are A-OK for where they go next, which we’ve seen in the weather. We had a typhoon. Everything was safe, fortunately. Things then come back to New York. We make sure they’re in the same condition, because our consignment agreements have been negotiated, especially on my end, to make sure that we’re always checking condition while under Christie’s custody. If there’s a guarantee, you’re looking to maybe find a third-party to re-insure Christie’s assurance to the seller that we’re going to pay a minimum price for the work. And you’re finalizing. This is where sort of legal and the business trust is great, because you’re finalizing estimates, and legal is now part of the conversation of looking through what the estimates are going to be like in the catalog. You both have mentioned the little symbols before. I have to say, I’ll toot my own horn, that I get to pick the symbols when we have a new one, on wingdings or whatever that is. But it’s sort of the last minute touches. Most of my big negotiations have occurred already. They occur earlier and earlier each season. So for the fall season, they now start in July and go through August and September. So at this point, most of any biggest state that we knew about on the market, if something were to happen, I think we’d be looking at May for New York for that.
Katie Wilson-Milne: For now. Yeah.
Steve Schindler: Right.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So it sounds like the bulk of your legal work is this long process of contract negotiations from the very beginning with the legal team. And then what are you doing when the auctions are over? Let’s say when the catalog is, quote-unquote, finalized.
Maggie Hoag: Sure. Well, then there’s the push for the third-party guarantees for anything that has a guarantee. And there’s a new concept that is called the conversion. So if you have someone who sees it online, sees a lot online and says, I want to be the third-party guarantor of that lot. And we say, that lot is not guaranteed. The seller took an agency deal, an enhanced hammer, or maybe even a seller’s commission deal.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right.
Steve Schindler: Right.
Maggie Hoag: We commercially have to decide for Christie’s and for the seller, does it make sense to quote “convert” the deal? So we approach the seller with the offer. They may say, no way, you have eight interested parties, I want to keep this.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, this is a great sign not to need an agency.
Maggie Hoag: This is fantastic. Or they say, yes, that particular lot we’ve been really worried about. We do not want that thing back in our house. We very much want you to find a third-party. Can you get them up? Can you make the deal better? So, it’s a lot of negotiations relating to that, and it has to be about what the seller and Christie’s decide to do together.
Steve Schindler: Because that’s such an interesting scenario. I hadn’t really thought of it in some ways that way, because normally, I think you think of, I mean, Christie’s is the sort of first line, and they’re either going to offer a guarantee or they’re not. And if they do, they’ll offer it at a price and maybe that will be negotiated with the consigner. But then, in this scenario, you have Christie’s and the consigner kind of on one side of the negotiation, and then this random, this third party that has sort of shown up is on the other. So instead of negotiating for maybe a lower guarantee with the consigner, you’re now sort of joining forces, I think, right, to try to get the best deal for the consigner.
Maggie Hoag: I think that’s right, and it’s reminding the consigner of why they made the decision in the first place. If they were presented with both types of deals, why did they choose the agency deal instead of the guarantee? And in the heat of the pressure of will this sell, will this sell, you need to be calm with the seller. And also, if I were the seller, I’d ask questions like, does this person want my artwork? Like, there is sort of an emotional part of it, too. Are they just gambling or do they want to own this because they love it? And in a family collection situation, if the seller wants someone to value their mother’s father’s artwork, they want the money, of course, but it’s being very open with the seller about the interest levels is the most important part. And this is a little bit of a newer construct, I would say, for me, this. You maybe had one or two ten years ago, and now this is a thing.
Katie Wilson-Milne: This is the model. Are there other, besides just the generic you’re negotiating these deals, are there specific legal issues that come up over and over again for you? I mean, that could be a most obvious thing, like you were talking about antiquities, so thinking that there was good provenance, but then really having no paperwork and having to make a risk assessment, because there’s nothing showing there’s a real, there’s a problem, but there’s nothing showing there’s not a problem. I don’t know, are there just, are there things, or maybe more technical business points that come up over and over?
Maggie Hoag: Antiquities, huge, and Chinese works of art, huge with provenance, every lot being vetted, every lot needing to fit within Christie’s policy or go through an exceptions-type discussion, which ultimately would end up with me for New York, because I’m obviously going to take a bigger risk than my lawyer who’s working with the Antiquities Department. And I’ve also seen things before, but you never know if you’re making the right assessment when it’s that it doesn’t seem wrong, but we don’t have the paperwork to make it right.
Katie Wilson-Milne: You don’t know, you just don’t.
Maggie Hoag: But oftentimes that’s not where we get a subpoena, and we get the subpoena on the we have great provenance, but we didn’t know about something along the way.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Different podcast, but yes.
Maggie Hoag: Title comes up all the time, because we need to make sure that those junior coordinators aren’t scared about asking for paperwork. So my paralegal pre-auction and post-auction has to do these things called novation amendments, because we didn’t get the entity entirely correct, because we weren’t given the entity. So we’ve put it under wife and it’s husband and wife.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Or it’s a trust.
Steve Schindler: Right, right.
Maggie Hoag: Correct.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah. Or not the trust.
Maggie Hoag: And it’s sort of, my answer is, when I do little update trainings on that is, ask the question in August. Like, let’s get this sorted out, so we know who we’re paying. Those are benign. Nobody’s looking to do anything wrong. It’s just that we didn’t have the right paperwork to know that it should have been LLC.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right, and I think in these art-collecting families, this is so common to not know what, you didn’t form these entities, you weren’t involved in the tax planning or the business planning. So we find all the time that our very sophisticated clients do not know what person or entity actually owns their objects.
Maggie Hoag: I don’t have any paperwork for the artwork that I’ve purchased.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, I know, I think, well, because it’s not worth very much, but it’s still wonderful.
Maggie Hoag: No, me too.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right. That absolutely— I think about what I tell our clients and how I live my own life and how different that is.
Steve Schindler: Yeah, no, it’s the same, yeah.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I remember you telling me, Steve, that you like never read a boilerplate contract and you just sign it.
Steve Schindler: It’s true half the time, I mean. I used to, and I was like, you know— I don’t know, you’re renting a car. What are you going to do? You’re going to start negotiating? You can’t. It’s not going to happen.
Maggie Hoag: My husband asked me to lead the negotiation for his car purchase and I said, no way.
Katie Wilson-Milne: No, just buy it. I mean, negotiate, but. So, okay, last couple of questions. I think looking back on this 14 years, soon to be 15 years, the art market since 2011, in some ways, as we said, has changed very little, but it has become more regulated. And it’s our impression that especially at the auction houses, and maybe really only at the auction houses in the United States, has there been noticeable change in maybe how legal is integrated, in how deals are papered, in the kind of diligence that’s done. But has that changed your practice? I mean, either changes in regulation or just changes in sort of the culture around diligence.
Maggie Hoag: I think so. I mean, I think a lot of it starts in the EU. So, with the consumer protection regulations, with the EU cultural property regulations, the Bank Secrecy Act, we’re a global company.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Which were specifically extended to the art world in Europe.
Maggie Hoag: GDPR. All of that, because we’re global, we need to follow as a global company. Antitrust, the US is usually the leader in the antitrust rules. So whoever has the most onerous rules, there are differentiations. There are things that we cannot do in Paris, sometimes in Hong Kong. But overall, we try to be consistent because we want the consigner’s approach to be consistent, whatever sales site you’re consigning to. So making those laws global is essential. But we’ve seen huge shifts with AML and sanctions. And I have no idea how the tariff situation is going to happen.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Maybe nothing. Maybe significant. Right.
Steve Schindler: Yeah.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right now, there are no tariffs specifically impacting your auctions of fine art, right?
Maggie Hoag: Well, we had a really successful European— or a New York collection of European wine, and it was already here in the US. And thank goodness, because-
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, I forgot about wine.
Steve Schindler: Because we deal in fine art, but then there’s wine, there’s automobiles, there’s like-
Maggie Hoag: A Tiffany lamp is a lamp.
Steve Schindler: Everything.
Maggie Hoag: You look at that harmonized tariff schedule, which makes my eyes bleed, and the customs guy is saying, that’s a lamp.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Silverware. Right, all kinds of stuff.
Maggie Hoag: Yeah.
Steve Schindler: Sure. Lots of stuff.
Maggie Hoag: Yeah.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Those are all actually major legal adjustments to adjust to. And how do you learn that stuff? I mean, let’s— the Fifth Directive in Europe, which is the thing that changed, it extended a lot of the bank regulations to the fine art world and the antiquities world. I mean, how do you integrate that?
Maggie Hoag: So we sort of assign one lawyer based in the jurisdiction to be the expert. We sometimes are able to get outside counsel to help us out with that, and then they have to memorialize it to everybody, and we all have to become mini-experts so that we still have the knowledge base somewhere, but we all have to adopt it into practice. Everybody needs to know what the EU Consumer Protection Act allowed with the right of returned goods, and why all of a sudden that language changes in our contract, you have to be able to explain it. I think the only thing I’m really bad at is explaining things like tax forfeiture and all of the French tax issues, where I’m sort of like, I don’t know, I’m at a loss. But yeah, it’s making sure that we’re up on things, and having good external council friends like you all to be advising us.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah. And I think that makes a lot of sense, assigning specialists in your department, so that while you should all know enough, as you said, some people can go deep.
Steve Schindler: It’s issue-spotting, right? That’s this classical, like I know enough to call somebody. I know enough that this is a problem. I may not know the answer, but I need to find out.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And I’m assigning you to be the person I call.
Steve Schindler: Exactly. Right.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Are there any other changes that you’ve observed in your, maybe not even just at Christie’s, but just in auction house, workings and business and structure over the last decade and a half?
Maggie Hoag: I think everybody’s gotten a little more savvy. You see changes in tastes, of course. I mean, even 14 years in, and I’ve seen 2021 become that truly dominant in what they’re doing. And we and our competitors sort of arrange those departments differently. But for us, we’ve grouped 20th and 21st century together as a group. And American Art is with them in prints and photographs. It’s a giant, giant, giant group. And then we’re seeing France and Paris sales at all auction houses really becoming strong. You know, and then you have Basel and then Hong Kong has become its own specialty market. And the auction houses have amazing new buildings there. It’s art. Building at the Henderson is like amazing. And I want to see it in person so badly. So it’s sort of becoming like it’s becoming multi-jurisdiction with specialties along the way. But we’re still a company as a whole that everybody needs to work together. And knowing everybody at the company, it’s not separated by those are the Hong Kong people. And I’m not talking lawyers. I know who our Hong Kong specialists are. I mean, we’re not that big. None of us are that big. And I think that’s sort of funny, because I think sometimes people think that my legal department has probably 25 people. And I think you guys probably name most of them.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I wish.
Steve Schindler: Yes, we know.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So you’re saying it’s become more global.
Maggie Hoag: Become more global and unified at the same time. Yeah.
Steve Schindler: Right. Yeah, certainly the practices, the AML practices, as you said, have filtered down to the US. And in some ways, that’s been very helpful, I think, because the kinds of questions that we, on behalf of consigning clients now have to answer to you, don’t really exist elsewhere in this country for those types of clients. And getting sort of more familiar with them, I think, just sort of warms them up a little bit in the event that they ultimately do become the law here, which so far they haven’t.
Maggie Hoag: I agree with that. And I don’t want our clients being scared of laws, because they’re going to protect you either on the sell side or on the buy side, which most of our clients do both types of transactions.
Steve Schindler: Right. So maybe one last question is, you know, Katie and I every day get inquiries and questions about aspiring art lawyers. And we both teach and we get all of the people who say, what kind of advice can you give to people who want to become art lawyers? And so I’m going to ask you that question on behalf of all of those inquiring students and young people.
Maggie Hoag: I also do probably about, I would say, two a week and sometimes they’re already in law school and sometimes they’re in college and sometimes they’re not even either. I have to start it with like this dismaying news.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I know.
Maggie Hoag: It’s like, be a good lawyer. Do you really want to be a lawyer? Because if someone had asked me that, I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I got stuck here. So thank goodness there’s art involved. But I had to make it happen myself. So learn how to be a good lawyer. You have to go to a big firm. And I think they hate hearing that.
Katie Wilson-Milne: It’s such traditional advice, but I literally always say this is such traditional advice, but I think it’s still true.
Maggie Hoag: No one at a museum is going to be able to have the time to train you from that day one of starting. I barely have interaction with our interns, and I used to, but there’s no way that I am able to do that anymore. Hopefully, they’re getting trained well, but usually we think of projects for them and hope that they have the confidence to do the projects well. But the externships, the internships are essential, and the pro bono work, for me at least, was the only way that I learned how to do anything outside of trial litigation.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So get to a good firm where you can do some pro bono work.
Maggie Hoag: And where they believe in pro bono work, and it doesn’t have to be art pro bono work. It can be anything, but it’s where you learn the confidence and wherewithal to manage a case pretty much on your own, which is what art law is, even though you have colleagues to work with you. A lot of it is counseling a client on your own and making sure that you’re giving the right advice without looking at a law.
Steve Schindler: It’s hard to know how— I mean, that is sort of this key of like being in a position where you have to make decisions, and obviously you need some training before you can do that, but that always was something that I learned a lot from even in my old firm when I was left my own devices usually on pro bono cases or smaller cases where the partners were saying, okay, well, you figure this out. And then when we started the firm and it was just the three of us coming from our big firms, it was really the first time when the buck sort of stopped. Like that was the decision, right? And there was no one to turn to. Like even in a big firm, there’s always someone else. There’s like someone who’s more senior than you, someone who’s been around. And that was a sort of frightening sort of proposition, but I think ultimately really important.
Maggie Hoag: I mean, the most important things I learned was from a pro bono client who was an artist, a playwright, and a rapper. So he had a lot of different issues.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, thank God it was free. Well, thank you so much, Maggie. It was a delight.
Steve Schindler: Maggie, this was delightful. Thank you for joining us.
Maggie Hoag: Of course.
Steve Schindler: And that’s it for today’s podcast. Please subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts, and send us feedback at podcast@schlaw.com. And if you like what you hear, give us a five-star rating. We are also featuring the original music of Chris Thompson. And finally, we want to thank our fabulous producer, Jackie Santos, for making us sound so good.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Until next time, I’m Katie Wilson-Milne.
Steve Schindler: And I’m Steve Schindler, bringing you the Art Law Podcast, a podcast exploring the places where art intersects with and interferes with the law.
Katie Wilson-Milne: The information provided in this podcast is not intended to be a source of legal advice. You should not consider the information provided to be an invitation for an attorney-client relationship, should not rely on the information as legal advice for any purpose, and should always seek the legal advice of competent counsel in the relevant jurisdiction.
Music by Chris Thompson. Produced by Jackie Santos.