Michael Frisby – Lionsgate

A few years ago, when Debbie Allen and her sister set out to turn a dance studio into something bigger, one of the first calls they made was to Michael Frisby. It wasn’t a legal call, not exactly — it was a request for help building something that mattered to them.

Michael Frisby | Lionsgate | Senior Vice President, Legal and Business Affairs

Frisby said yes, and he’s been saying yes ever since, eventually becoming board president. That instinct, to show up early and stay involved for the long haul, turns out to be the same one he brings to his day job, where the questions are less about art and more about who owns it.

Law at the edge of a new industry

As senior vice president of legal and business affairs at Lionsgate, Frisby sits at a genuinely unsettled frontier of entertainment law. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how music gets made and consumed, and the legal framework meant to govern it hasn’t caught up. Copyright law, built around the assumption that a human hand created the work in question, wasn’t designed to answer what happens when a song is generated, in whole or in part, by a machine — who owns it, who gets paid, and what rights, if any, attach to it. Those aren’t hypothetical questions for Frisby’s team; they’re live issues shaping contracts being signed right now.

The pace of change is part of what makes the work demanding. A legal position that holds up today may need revisiting in six months as courts issue new rulings or lawmakers weigh in, which means Frisby’s team can’t simply write a policy once and move on. Instead, staying current has become an ongoing discipline in its own right — one Frisby treats as central to the job rather than a distraction from it.

Rather than wait for courts or legislators to settle the matter, Frisby and his team have moved to get ahead of it, building AI-specific clauses into contracts designed to limit the company’s exposure as the legal landscape shifts underneath them. That work touches nearly every stage of production, from pre-production through post, requiring close coordination with creative teams to make sure music use holds up against standards that are still being written in real time. Frisby’s team also tracks court cases and legislative developments closely, treating the ability to stay current as a competitive advantage rather than a compliance obligation.

Growing through acquisition

That vigilance has mattered more than usual lately, because Frisby’s workload hasn’t stayed still either. Lionsgate has been expanding its library aggressively, and Frisby’s team played a central role in the legal work behind two major recent acquisitions: the extensive eOne catalog of television programming, and Pilgrim Media, whose catalog is largely unscripted content. Both deals added meaningful scope and complexity to an already full plate, layering fresh catalog and rights questions on top of the ongoing AI work.

It’s the kind of growth that fits squarely within Lionsgate’s broader identity. The company, traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker LION, describes itself as one of the world’s leading standalone, pure-play, publicly traded content companies — a diversified motion picture and television business built around a world-class portfolio of brands and franchises, a talent management and production arm, and a library that now spans more than 20,000 film and television titles. Absorbing acquisitions of that scale without losing legal rigor requires exactly the kind of steady, detail-oriented oversight Frisby’s team has built its reputation on.

Every new catalog brings its own tangle of existing licenses, music clearances, and rights histories that need to be understood before they can be folded into the larger library. That due diligence work rarely makes headlines the way the acquisitions themselves do, but it’s what determines whether a deal actually strengthens the company’s position or quietly creates problems years down the line. Frisby’s team has made a point of treating that groundwork as seriously as the more visible negotiations that precede it.

Efficiency by design

Managing that growth with a lean legal team is, by Frisby’s own account, as much a strategic exercise as a legal one. He’s focused on striking a careful balance: embracing the operational upside of new technology while still protecting the intellectual property that makes Lionsgate’s catalog valuable in the first place. That balance gets built through proactive contract language, tight coordination across creative and business units, and deliberate staffing decisions that keep the team capable of absorbing more work without diluting its rigor.

The payoff shows up in the projects the team gets to support. Among the slate Frisby’s group is excited about is next year’s Michael Jackson biopic, a high-profile project that carries its own dense set of music rights and licensing considerations — precisely the kind of high-stakes, detail-heavy work that rewards the efficient, well-coordinated legal function Frisby has built. It’s a fitting example of the throughline in his approach: the goal isn’t just to manage legal risk, but to build a team fast and flexible enough that legal complexity never becomes the thing slowing a project down.

Off the clock & giving back

Outside of Lionsgate, Frisby’s clearest passion is the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, where he serves as president of the board of directors. Founded by dancer and choreographer Debbie Allen Nixon and her husband, former NBA star Norm Nixon, the academy has grown over 25 years from a dance studio into a much broader arts institution, offering programs well beyond dance alone. A few years ago, the academy moved into a refurbished building purchased with the help of Shonda Rhimes, giving the organization a home worthy of its ambitions.

The academy operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit built around accessibility, and the numbers back that mission up: roughly 70 percent of its students attend on scholarship, and its accredited middle school program enrolls young artists with more than 90 percent receiving financial assistance. Beyond its enrolled students, the academy’s free community programs reach more than 15,000 people each year across Los Angeles and beyond.

For Frisby, the connection is personal as much as philanthropic — a relationship with Debbie Allen and her sister that predates his board role and has only deepened since he stepped into it. It’s not a stretch to see the same values at work in both halves of his life: a belief that the right structure, built early and maintained with care, is what allows something worthwhile to keep growing. Whether that structure is a licensing clause built to withstand a legal landscape still in flux, or a scholarship program built to outlast any single building, Frisby’s instinct is the same — show up, build it right, and stay involved long after the initial ask.