Most creator contracts are never reviewed by a lawyer, according to Joey Roesler, who knows, because he used to be the attorney drafting them for brands. 

That buy-side experience has shaped CMG Talent, the Beverly Hills-based talent management company Joey founded in January 2025. After representing multiple corporations in the creator space, he watched brand deal contracts reach creator teams that weren’t equipped to review them closely and saw unfavorable provisions go unnoticed and get signed. The conclusion he drew was that the most notable unmet need in creator representation wasn’t reach or relationships. It was legal protection. 

“A lot of these creators didn’t have adequate legal representation,” Joey says. “And we felt that was the most important thing.”

CMG Talent now manages more than 130 creators across lifestyle, beauty, food, and entertainment, handling management, brand deal negotiation, and in-house legal review through offices in Beverly Hills, Nashville, and Indianapolis. The firm’s legal arm, Roesler Law, and its affiliate CMG Worldwide, an intellectual property licensing company, underpin the model. Joey, who recently joined Northwestern’s law faculty as an adjunct professor, argues that bundling legal services into creator representation is not a value-add. In a business where contracts carry provisions that can survive indefinitely, he says, it is the core service.

Creators Are Signing Contracts That Follow Them for Decades

The consequences of inadequate legal review rarely surface immediately, according to Joey. They appear years later, when a provision signed without scrutiny becomes a liability.

Joey recounts a case involving one of his creators and a skincare brand. The creator had signed a one-page contract in 2022 granting the brand the right to run ads using her likeness, with no creator-side termination rights. When she later raised objections publicly, the brand’s law firm sent a cease-and-desist. “Basically, what it said was that they could run the ads, and the contract would go until it’s terminated, and a different part said it could only be terminated by the brand,” he says. “Ads on your face forever, you can’t do anything about it.”

The hazard, he adds, compounds across a career. Non-disparagement clauses, standard in brand deal contracts, can prohibit a creator from saying anything negative about a company, its affiliates, and its subsidiaries, indefinitely. “You’re an influencer for 10 years, and you’ve got thousands of these little invisible strings that could potentially trip you up,” he says.

One Roof, One Review Cycle

Fragmented creator representation was the second problem Joey observed from the corporate side of deals. When a brand was negotiating with a creator whose team spanned multiple representatives across different time zones, deals slowed, and terms agreed by email often drifted from what appeared in the long-form contract. “The deals would always take 10 times too long,” he says. “Information would get lost, and the other side’s interests were just spread too thin across too many people.”

CMG Talent’s response is consolidation. The firm operates as both a management company and a licensed and bonded talent agency, with publicity, affiliate service configuration, and legal review handled in-house. When a term sheet-level agreement forms, the manager’s deal notes become the legal team’s starting point. Brands supply the contract in 99% of deals, Joey notes, which puts creators at a structural disadvantage from the outset.

His team’s review targets three recurring categories of discrepancy. Commercial term drift is the most common: a deal memo specifying 14 days of exclusivity may become the term of the agreement plus 14 days in the contract, a substantial multiplication. Usage rights described as one month in negotiations may carry perpetual scope buried in the boilerplate. The second category covers risk allocation, including indemnification structures and kill fee provisions. The third is attorneys’ fees clauses, which shift the cost of future disputes onto the creator. “About 60% of contracts do need some editing,” Joey says. When his team’s redlines go back, he adds, brands accept them without counter around 80% of the time.

Joey says CMG’s legal protection extends beyond contract review and into enforcement. “Legal protection doesn’t mean much if you aren’t willing to enforce it,” he says. He points to a recent case where a brand accepted a creator’s videos, ran ads using the content, and then ignored repeated efforts to collect the mid-four-figure fee. CMG filed a lawsuit, and the brand wired the full amount the same day it was served with the complaint. “Our talent really values knowing that we stick up for them,” Joey says. “They know we’re willing to go all the way to protect their interests.”

Follower Count Tells the Wrong Story

Alongside the legal model, Joey argues that the Creator Economy’s most widely used measure of commercial value is the wrong one.

CMG Talent’s early roster illustrated the disconnect. As Joey explains, some creators with 20,000 to 40,000 followers were generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in brand deals. Others with millions of followers couldn’t close a $500 partnership. “It’s about the demographic that those creators have and their credibility to tell a story,” he says. The firm tracks niche authority and conversion potential on the premise that an audience trusting a creator enough to act on a recommendation in a specific category is more commercially valuable than a larger, shallower following.

That framing shapes who the firm signs and who it turns away. Talent managers have individual discretion over their rosters, drawing on their own expertise in specific content categories. When a creator’s goals don’t match the firm’s existing strengths in a given niche, Joey says he’ll direct them elsewhere. “I don’t want to deal with a talent that is now saying you guys don’t do enough of this for me,” he says.

The Conflict Built Into Dual-Side Agencies

Joey reserves his sharpest criticism for agencies that represent both creators and brands. The conflict, he argues, leaves creators systematically underserved.

The pattern, as he describes it: an agency receives a marketing budget from a brand intended to fund a campaign across multiple creators, including from outside the agency’s own roster. A small portion goes to its own creators; the rest stays with the agency, which also collects a commission from both the brand and the talent. “They’re often getting a 40% commission, effectively 100% commission on whatever they don’t have to spend to appease the client for that period,” Joey says.

CMG Talent represents only the talent side. Joey credits a commercial real estate broker who spent 50 years representing only tenants, never landlords, as an influence on the principle. “I take a lot of pride in just representing the talent’s interests,” he says. When a conflict does arise, as when Joey recognized a contract sent for review was one he had originally drafted for a corporate client, disclosure and recusal are the protocol. He describes that case as the exception, not the rule, because the firm stays on one side of most transactions.

Early Agencies Coasted. That Window Is Closing.

Creator agencies, Joey argues, have benefited from the same dynamic he once mistook for trading skill while trading Bitcoin: a market growing fast enough that modest execution looked like expertise. “Most agencies don’t review their own contracts with a lawyer or otherwise,” he says. “You can be an answering machine. You sit, you get your commission, you negotiate these inbound deals.”

As more agencies enter the space and the market professionalizes, he argues that a multifaceted service model becomes a requirement for competitiveness rather than a point of differentiation. The early agencies were first to a fast-growing category and could get away with a lot, Joey says. That advantage, he notes, does not compound indefinitely.

CMG Talent’s plan is to adapt its services to wherever creator needs shift, including experiential brand activations, long-form content integrations, and emerging platform formats. “Whatever the needs of the modern creator are, we’re going to adapt, and we’re going to reverse engineer our services to be there,” Joey says.

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