Ernest Del (born January 16, 1952) is an American entertainment attorney. Del served as Senior Advisor at
ZeniMax Media
ZeniMax Media Inc. is an American video game holding company based in Rockville, Maryland, and founded in 1999.
The company owns publisher Bethesda Softworks with its development unit Bethesda Game Studios (developer of ''The Elder Scrolls,'' ...
from 2017 till 2021.
Del previously served as President of ZeniMax from 1999 up until April 2017.
He also serves as a director of Delivery Agent and of the Silver Eagle Acquisition Corporation.
Education
Del graduated with degrees in economics and political science from the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
in 1973 and earned his
J.D. degree from
Stanford University Law School in 1976.
Career
Del began his law career in 1976 as an antitrust litigator at the law firm of Wyman, Bautzer, Rothman & Kuchel, focused primarily on cases addressing the transformation of the nationwide Bell telephone system in the late 1970s before shifting to transactional entertainment law. Initially he worked exclusively on feature films in the United States and abroad. He later worked on television and digital media.
In December 1999, he became President at ZeniMax Media. He additionally served as president of ZeniMax Europe from December 2010 to August 2012. Del later became part of the law firm Del, Shaw, Moonves, Tanaka, Finkelstein & Lezcano.
Entertainment law
Del's clients include:
Fox's former executive and current CEO of
Tribune Company
Tribune Media Company, also known as Tribune Company, was an American multimedia conglomerate headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
Through Tribune Broadcasting, Tribune Media was one of the largest television broadcasting companies, owning 39 ...
,
Peter Liguori,
Kevin Reilly (Chairman of Entertainment for the Fox Broadcasting Company), Former
CW executive
Dawn Ostroff
Dawn Ostroff is an American businesswoman. She is the chief content officer and advertising business officer of Spotify, and the former president of entertainment of The CW and former president of Condé Nast Entertainment.
Early life and educ ...
, 20th TV's
Dana Walden
Dana Walden (born 1964) is an American businesswoman and the Chairman of Disney General Entertainment Content.
Early life and education
Dana Freedman was born to a Jewish family in Los Angeles in 1964. Her father was in the travel industry and ...
,
Lionsgate
Lions Gate Entertainment Corporation, doing business as Lionsgate, is a Canadian-American entertainment company. It was formed by Frank Giustra on July 10, 1997, domiciled in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and is currently headquartered ...
CEO
Jon Feltheimer
Jon Feltheimer (born September 2, 1951) is the Chief Executive Officer of Lions Gate Entertainment and has held that position since 2000. Feltheimer has led Lionsgate to grow into the leading Canadian independent filmed entertainment studio.
Bi ...
, former
The WB Television Network
The WB Television Network (for Warner Bros., or the "Frog Network", for its former mascot, Michigan J. Frog) was an American television network launched on broadcast television on January 11, 1995, as a joint venture between the Warner Bro ...
network president David Janollari,
Leslie Moonves
Leslie Roy Moonves (; born October 6, 1949) is an American media executive who was the chairman and CEO of CBS Corporation from 2003 until his resignation in September 2018 following numerous allegations of sexual harassment, sexual assault and ...
( former president and CEO,
CBS Corporation
The second incarnation of CBS Corporation (the first being a short-lived rename of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation) was an American multinational media conglomerate with interests primarily in commercial broadcasting, publishing, and ...
), actor-producer
Paul Reiser
Paul Reiser (; born March 30, 1956) is an American actor, comedian, and television writer. He is known for his roles as Michael Taylor in the 1980s sitcom ''My Two Dads'', Paul Buchman in the NBC sitcom ''Mad About You'', Modell in the 1982 fi ...
, Stuart Bloomberg the former chairman of
ABC Entertainment
The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) is an American commercial broadcast television network. It is the flagship property of the ABC Entertainment Group division of The Walt Disney Company. The network is headquartered in Burbank, Calif ...
,
Bob Greenblatt (chairman of
NBC Entertainment
NBCUniversal Television and Streaming is the television and streaming arm of NBCUniversal, and the direct descendant and successor of the former division NBCUniversal Television Group, which existed from 2003 to 2019.
History NBC Broadcasting
In ...
). Some of his associates from Hollywood sat on ZeniMax's Board of Directors: Leslie Moonves, Harry Sloan and Jerry Bruckheimer.
Del helped
Harry E. Sloan
Harry Evans Sloan (born March 8, 1950) is an American business executive, a former chairman of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and SBS Broadcasting, and a former entertainment lawyer. In partnership with fellow former motion picture company chairman ...
to rebuild
MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and abbreviated as MGM, is an American film, television production, distribution and media company owned by Amazon through MGM Holdings, founded on April 17, 1924 a ...
, when Sloan was chairman and CEO there. He also repped
Providence Equity Partners in the creation of
Hulu, as well as advising Bethesda Softworks.
In 2009 and 2010, Del was called a power lawyer by ''
The Hollywood Reporter
''The Hollywood Reporter'' (''THR'') is an American digital and print magazine which focuses on the Hollywood film, television, and entertainment industries. It was founded in 1930 as a daily trade paper, and in 2010 switched to a weekly larg ...
''.
See also
*
Greg Bautzer
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Del, Ernest
American lawyers
ZeniMax Media
1952 births
Living people