[Knight Talks opening music] Welcome to Knight Talks, the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications talk show produced by students for you.

I'm Anais Ramentol, a first-year student studying Media Production, Management and Technology.

And our guest today is Amy Araya, a University of Florid CJC graduate who worked for HBO Latin America, Viacom Prime Video and Amazon Studios.

She's no the Associate Principal Counsel for The Walt Disney Company's National Geographic.

Hi, Amy.

Thanks for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's truly a pleasure being here and seeing students actually running it.

So you earned your bachelor' degree in public relations here at University of Florida.

How did that experience set you up for your future career in media?

Oh, my love for all things media was kind of fostered here, frankly.

I will never forget my initial course with, I want to say, professor Mike Foley, where he taught us the power of storytelling.

And this was like back in, I think, 2005 or so.

So it's been a while, but I imagine he's still doing his thing.

And in that course I remember we covered elements surrounding invasion of privacy and fact checking and points that to this day I still use in my workplace, and I get a glimmer when I think about, you know or when I ask producers, like, show me the primary and secondary sources for those facts.

So studying here taught me kind of the power of communication and how you can create a shared experience for everyone.

And the idea that I get to support that now is just fantastic.

Touching on law school, after graduating from UF, you studied law at University of Miami.

When did you know you wante to get into the legal aspects of media and that law school was your next move?

I took a break right between undergrad and law school.

I didn't kno I wanted to do law school yet, so I had obtained, after a great internship, a role with Ketchum Public Relations, which is an Omnicom company, and I was working in their DC office handling international government affairs, and I loved what I was doing.

I was drafting op eds, I was crafting, you know, memos on the approach in different territories.

I was setting up events and working for a fantasti former reporter for McClatchy.

So my writing skills were key.

And what I also got to do while I was there was focus on government regulatory filings.

And this sounds uncommon, but I really loved diving into the writing of those U.S. government filings.

And so it dawned on me that what I truly started to appreciate as I'm writing about these international affairs was the framework behind the words.

And I had this yearning to get into not just communicatio but the international law arena.

So in order to do that I ended up going to law school, and I focused in law schoo on both intellectual property, which are the bundle of rights that form media and allow people to exploit it, as well as international law.

Your career began as a fellow at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Tell us about your time in Washington, DC.

Oh, DC was fantastic.

So by the time I was in la school, I still had that kind of yearning of exposure to DC.

And I had lived in DC and I thought, how can I be closer to those government systems while also being able to do what I love?

I was fortunate enoug that through kind of maneuvering an opportunity I attended an event and in line waiting for food at the event was a Federal circuit judge.

So I thought, this is my chance.

I ran up to him.

I stood behind him in the line and I just said, hi, my name is Amy and it is such a pleasure to meet you.

And I had naturally researched him beforehand because I knew who the panelists were.

Always take advantage of those opportunities, if you can.

And he presented me with the chance to join him, over time, to join him as a fellow at the US Court of Appeals, which is the court that has nationwid subject matter jurisdiction over patent claims, suits against the government, as well as Veterans Affairs, and it was such a learning experience.

I was surrounded by frankly, everyone was smarter than me.

And that's kind of what drives an individual to learn more and be more curious.

So not only was I catty corner to the White House getting to walk in there every day, but I would sit and listen to oral arguments.

And these were the best attorneys in the country representing Apple, Samsung, all of the top entities.

So, you know, they were billing high rates.

And I would just listen, frankly.

And getting to help draft and understand from the judge how to approach cases it was invaluable.

And to do that in DC was something that also stuck with me.

And one of the reasons why throughout my career I've gone to a few different places, but I've always come back to DC.

From there, you served as an associate attorney for DLA Piper.

What is that organization and what did your role entail?

So it's a fantastic law firm.

It's one of the largest in the world actually.

And it was the natural progression when you leave cour is to go work at a big law firm.

And I did, and the role that I had there was still in the IP realm because, again, I had gone to the court, I had worked at the court where patent law was the behemoth.

I mean, it was the Royal Patent Court, essentially.

And because of my communication background, I was one of the few who, although I didn't have an electrical or an engineering background, I was helping work on electrical and mechanical patents because I recognized how to take very complex information, kind of process it, and then reiterate it to a jury in plain English, which was a skill that, again, plugging the school of journalism here, I had attained.

So it was a great role.

It was my first, my first, you know, attorney role.

I did realize, however, that litigation, as much fun as it was, wasn't what brought me joy.

What I ended up loving more was the drafting of the patents, the written part.

So that kind of leads us into your next question.

So in 2014, you went to work for HBO Latin America, first as a corporate attorney and later as the manager of business and legal affairs.

Tell us about these positions, the responsibilities and how you came to work for HBO.

So when I decided to leave the firm, I reached out to a company I had interned with in law school.

Always take advantage of internships.

My internship in law school was with Yahoo Hispanic Americas.

And I really learned so much.

It was the practical sid of things that there were times I may have spent more time in the office than in class because I was just getting such great exposure to actual deals, true agreements, content, aspects like that.

So when I left the law firm, I reached out to Yahoo and to their general counsel.

I said, hey I loved my time with you guys.

Do you have an opening?

And they said, we love you.

No, but HBO does.

So they helped set me up at HBO, recommended me and HBO was a blast.

I was in their Latin America office.

I was helping and learning how to manage development and production legal for television programing throughout Latin America.

So what that means is anything you see on TV as is now, there's so much work that goes into it from the development of scripts, writing the scripts, purchasing the scripts, ensuring that you have all of the relevant intellectual property rights for those script and the right people attached.

You want the right producer.

You want the right director aspects like that.

Then you move into pre-production and that's where, again, legal still plays a role.

We're making sure you have all the right locations, the scouts, the appropriate insurance, youre engaging the right talent, aspects like that, and then you mov into production, which is the, you know, as you guys can see, principal photography where you've got the cameramen, you've got the booms, you've got you're either creating a set or you are out in the wild.

And then of course, post-production, which many people don't realize is so relevant to the field and ensuring you have the right post-production house, the right editors, the right ADR individuals, those who work on the dialogue, aspects like that.

And my role was gettin to oversee all of those aspects.

So from inception of a project, of an idea, of a show, all the way out to its exploitation and the marketing and aspects like that, and I got to focus on that for Latin America.

Youve mentioned all the great things about working at HBO and about your career, but what were some of the biggest challenges managing business and legal affairs in multiple different countries?

That is a great question.

When I first started at HBO, I was telling my friends about it and they're like, well, what's so hard about figuring ou just the law of Latin America?

And I was like, guys, there are multiple countries there.

Like you have different jurisdictions.

You have civil law versus common law.

You have risks of all sorts.

And so for us, we were taking a format as an example of, you know, the Last Week Tonight format, which you can adapt in another territory and using local talent.

In the US, we have the First Amendment.

We're able to avail ourselves o that and criticize governments and use take pieces of IP from others and use that under an exception to copyright infringement: the fair use exception.

And the law provides for those avenues if you want to create a sho that kind of critiques systems.

In Latin America, that hadn't really been done on such a global scale throughout the continent.

So we had to go through each territory and engage attorneys and ask them, like, what's the law?

How can we do this really?

And calibrate risk from that point and figure out, okay, well, it works in this territory, but not there.

And on top of that, a little, an uncommon approach is not just what's legally acceptabl but what's culturally acceptable because what flies in the US in New York might not fly down in Argentina, or what flies i Brazil might not fly in the US.

So it was a really fun learning experience.

And it was a complex behemoth that we were abl to turn into a succinct process that I'm proud to say even past when I left HBO, they were still followin that process that I had crafted.

So what motivated your transition to then work at ViacomCBS in New York City, which is now Paramount.

As a Senior Counsel there, what did you oversee?

Yeah, I loved my time at HBO, and one of the things I recognized about Latin America is that the laws were still being developed in certain territories as it came to intellectual property with regard to television series.

So it dawned on me, okay I'd heard great things about MTV and Viacom, and when they had an opening, I thought, this is my chanc to really learn more of the U.S. side and get that more traditional training.

So I joined MTV, VH1, and Logo, and that was a whole othe adventure because the content, while the risks for the Latin American content were jurisdictional and aspects like that, the risk with MT was you're dealing with reality show, you're dealing unscripted.

There's les that you can plan and control.

You just have to really consider things in advance.

And being with Viacom I mean, they created real world.

Their lawyers are at the cusp of everything reality.

So for me to be trained by them and to also have access to all their documents and resources, I mean, I was getting to oversee programs, but I would sit at home late at night occasionally and just read through their template just so that I could learn and really obtain as much exposure as I could while I could.

So then in 2019, you moved to L.A. and worked at Prime Video and Amazon Studios.

With the rise of streaming services, what were the main legal issues that you faced in terms of distribution or piracy?

Oh, those are good questions.

Funny enough same distribution issues came up when dealing with Latin America because that was my focus with Amazon.

And Amazon, as an entity, to work for was an excellent training for me as well.

And you'll note I see each of these roles as educational opportunities for me.

Its no different than the fou years you guys are doing here.

There's an opportunity to learn.

That's how I treat it.

And with Amazon, it was adapting to a new form of work.

Amazon has fantastic leadership principles.

One of them is ownership.

And that essentially means you're not going to overlook the long term value just for the short term gain of something.

So I was in a position where I could look at things and scale them up because Amazon had the reach, the money, and the ability to reach so many more people.

So that jurisdictional game that I was playing now was on a different level, because we had so many more eyes at Amazon and the resources were different.

So it was really interesting to see how they're able to localize content versus other network providers.

In terms of distribution it was helping Amazon understand what was acceptable i each territory because initially they were also going in like, hey, we're from the US, how do we learn about these territories so we know how to best service these customers?

Because that's anothe leadership principle at Amazon: customer obsession.

They want to make sure that they're servicing their customers to the best form possible.

And doing that was a whole other learning experience.

And working in those industries and really infiltrating the markets there that deal with what traditional pay was, what Amazon was willing to pay, what kind of rights we were trying to obtain.

The fact that Amazon doesn' just distribute on television, they distribute on subscription, video on demand, different types of platforms.

Eventually they knew that they were going to merge into other avenues of media.

How do you gain the trust of locals in Latin America to be comfortable, to give you the right to exploit in all those manners?

So it was a great experience in that sense too.

That was massive a massive team effort.

With respect to any elements of piracy or privacy, the beauty of Amazon as well was that you had so many experts in the room.

So I had access to attorneys who were privacy experts, to attorneys who were piracy experts, to employment law experts.

So it kind of functions, with these bigger companies., it's almost like they have internal law firms that you're able to avail yourself of.

So it gives you that room t become an expert in what you do, yet still recogniz where you need to pull in help.

Fast forward to 2022, you joined The Walt Disney Company as Counsel for National Geographic, eventually as Associate Principal Counsel.

How did that opportunity arise and what does your role involve day to day?

Yeah, so back when I had worked in DC early in my career, I used to take a bus to work that would always pass by the National Geographic Museum and Headquarters.

And I always thought, if I leave DC, the one thing that could bring me back is working in media.

And there were only like two companies that handled media directly at the time, this kind of content, and that was like Discovery and Nat Geo.

Making that transition wa it ended up being an easy one.

I interviewe with a few different streamers and found that at the end of the day, the person at the Nat Geo, the Head of Legal, was the one who really called out to me.

She said something in our interview, which was, as we were talking about work-life balance, and she mentioned, listen, we're not doctors.

Your mental health comes first.

And that to me was so powerful because we all struggle with our issues.

I struggle with anxiety.

And to have somebody who's open about accepting that and recognizing that, okay, that's something that we'll keep note on.

That was huge for me.

So it was again an easy transitio for me to join Disney Nat Geo.

And now I get to do very kind of similar to what I've done elsewhere, bu a whole different playing field.

And what I mean by that is instead of just focusing on Latin America now, I'm helping oversee, as Network Legal, productions all over the world.

and there are two points I want to touch on there.

I mentioned Network Legal.

I say that because many of these big networks, they will engag third-party production companies to do the TV shows.

So if you look at the credits on TV shows, you'll notice that there are different production companies for most of the shows because you have executive producers who run them who have different areas of expertise, different types of access, different, you know, one of our shows deals with rock climbing.

You can't just throw any production company in there and expect them to know how to do that.

You can't expect the network necessarily to have all the resources to do that.

But if there's a productio company that, hey, we rock climb and we know how to film, great that's an awesome opportunity.

So on my side as Network Legal, I'm helping kind of oversee what they're doing on a day to day basis, while ensuring that the company is protected, and that the production is protected, that all rights appropriately flow up, that there's no ris to any of the cast or the crew, that we're not violating any third party rights through the content; example, through defamation or elements like that.

I wanted to go back and talk to you about that work-life balance that you mentioned.

Do you feel that you, as busy as you sound, do you think that you've been able to pursue a good work-life balance and pursue those personal passions?

I have, I have, and it took a lot of, interestingly enough, personal work.

It took me recognizing that I am in control of my own thoughts and that I' the one who judges myself most.

So when I finally was able to accept that and incorporate it into my life work-life balance came easily.

Working with so many unscripted and reality programs, how do you ensure compliance with legal requirements while also supporting creativ freedom in content development?

I like to say that my client is right down the hall, and I do not like to say no.

To be part of the creative process is, again, such a privilege.

Artists executive producers, script writers, the editors they are artists.

They are creating a product that brings worlds together that we that changes our perception of life, of the human experience.

To do that, it takes a lot of research and it takes massive teams.

Everybody is a part of it, from the production to the producer will flag hey, let's flag that for legal to make sure it's okay.

Wel make sure that there are outside counsel in each territory to ensure that any applicable law is being abided by.

And it takes a team and a manager that recognize what kind of process that entails.

So different areas where I'll step in and other areas where I won't be include or I won't want to be included.

As an example, early in my years, I learned that when you stick a lawyer in the writers room, writers stiff up and suddenly their creativity is a little inhibited.

So I thought, well, how can better service the production?

And I thought, let me stay out.

Or if I have to be there, I'm going to be in the very corner, unnoticeable, like throw a blanket over me so that these guys feel comfortable expressing their ideas and their thoughts without feeling inhibited by legal.

So my goal is to always take the law and apply i practically, express it clearly, and ensure that what I'm advising is for the best of all parties.

So what's something that people may be shocked or fascinated to learn about the legal side of entertainment or something that viewers maybe should know about?

An interesting fact about the legal side is how many contracts there are involved in a production.

You see something on TV and you don't realize that so much of it has been negotiated, from the individuals that you see just incidentally on screen occasionally to the writers behind the scene to the guy who is pouring coffee.

And I say that because if you ever read through the credits, and I highly recommend it because it's due respect to the hard crew that work on these projects, there are so many individuals involved and there's so much time for productions.

It takes it can take years to get a project from notepad to what you see on television, and the lawyers are such a pivotal part of that, ensuring that all of the rights filter up, that everything is being done fairly, equitably, in accordance with law.

If there are minors, there are a whole different set of rules and ethics that apply as well.

As a lawyer, you're not jus constrained to, “Is this legal?

Is this not?” You're also advising the compan and considering other elements such as reputational risk and public relations risk?

I'm no longer a PR expert, but if I see something that raises a flag or could present risks, I will pull in our PR team.

And one of the beauties of having done PR is that now I can recognize where that would be a flag.

Can you talk about a real world experience, about a time that you've impacte a production in a legal sense?

Of course.

I'm lucky enough that I feel like my impact is known on every production, even though, it's not obvious to most in that if the contracts are drafted, i the talent agreements are set, if the creatives don't hear from me, that means that things are running smoothly, and I've done my role for production.

But there was one instance where in Mexico there was a deadlin that we needed to meet in order to obtain the appropriate rights before distribution for a program, and we needed to obtai these certain rights from talent who he was a comedian and he wa actually in Japan at the time.

So we coordinated finding out, okay, when does he fly back?

Because we needed to get that documen signed by him within two days.

So I was not in Mexico.

I sent outside counsel, and outside counsel was waiting for him at the airport and they said, please, sir, we need you to sign this so we can go and file it tomorrow mornin first thing with the government.

And he signs it and they call me and I say, okay, great.

Guar that document with your life and file it tomorrow morning.

The next morning I get a call and my lawyers are like, we don't know what happened.

We don't see the signature.

We must have the wrong page Something must have gone wrong.

And I thought, well, what do you mean?

It just happened yesterday.

And they said, it's as if he never signed it.

And I said, okay, pull up the piece of paper and shine a light on it and just see if there's any hint of a signature.

They did.

And they said, wait, what?

And I go, he's a comedian, and he was in Japan.

I go, ask him what kind of pe he used to sign the agreement.

He used a pen with invisible ink.

So our team managed They rush back over to him, were able to find him, had him resign.

Thankfully we didn't miss the deadline, but that was, I consider, not necessarily legal, but my years of sleuthing helped provide that solution.

That is a really funny story.

So on social media, you're very vocal about the lack of diversity in the film industry.

What can be done to have more representation for Latinos in Hollywood?

Thank you for asking that question because it is a big deal, and not just from a point that it's relevant in modern day, but the financials really support diversity in content.

So when you look at profits and ethics, theyre two sides to the same coin.

Audiences support seeing immersive arenas of themselves on television.

Little Latina girl seeing herself on screen, it means the world and it's authentic because that is what form our population here in the US.

So including more Latinos in the room to have that conversation is a great first step.

Ensuring that diverse opinions are accounted for, be it through reportin and covering stories that impact Latinos t just reading more about it and in terms of that, supportin those kinds of individuals, too.

As an example, I am a Latina who grew up with a collectivist cultural value system, so we're tremendously loyal, but it comes to some extent with the recognition that we view the benefit of the group mor than the benefit of ourselves.

So that leads to a reluctance to self-promote, for example, in the workplace.

What I try to do no is if I recognize I'm in a group with Latinos or Latinas or Hispanic individuals, I'm going to encourage people to not be so humble.

Speak up about your wins and acknowledge them and be proud and let others know because this is a great way to promote yoursel and to further involve Latinos in, you know, the higher echelons of the groups, in the C-suites and elements like that.

Throughout this interview, you've given such great advice, but I want to know more.

So as a graduate from UF CJC, what's one piece of advice you would give to a student that wants to be in your shoes one day or work in media?

Be curious.

Always be curious.

Learning the opportunity to learn more, surrounding yourself with people from whom you can learn.

That's how you move forward.

That's how you approach different opinions, different diverse elements that allow you to consider all the elements as you continue up.

Being curious taking on all the internships.

You have the time now.

Reach out.

Ask for help.

Those of us who have made it are so grateful for the shoulders that we stood on, and if we can somehow pa it forward and give you that in and allow you the room to also experience and learn and grow, that's also a pleasure.

Thank you so much for your insights today, Amy.

I've love getting to know more about you and how you got to where you are today.

And thank you to our viewers for joining us tonight.

Until next time, good night.