Leslie Steinau

Leslie Steinau is a trusted legal advisor with more than 50 years of experience assisting companies and individuals with their business and estate planning legal problems. Among attorneys, his practice is unique. Over his lengthy career, his clients have included book and magazine publishers, authors and agents, and financial enterprises. He has represented privately held companies in all types of business, media, and commercial transactions and in all stages of development. His corporate transactional experience includes mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, spin-offs, and stock and asset purchases and sales. Regardless of the area of practice, Leslie views the attorney-client relationship as paramount. Many of his clients have been with him for more than 25 years.

In the intellectual property area, Leslie’s work on behalf of clients includes preparing purchase and sale agreements for book and magazine publishers, working with authors and agents on publishing, collaboration, licensing and related agreements, pre-publication manuscript vettings, trademark and copyright registrations, and resolving domain name disputes. 

Leslie’s financial services work has included numerous reinsurance, derivatives, swaps, repurchase, and loan transactions. 

Over the course of his career, he has assisted on the formation of numerous enterprises and their related shareholder, governance, and operating agreements. He has also negotiated and prepared employment, consulting, sales, licensing, distribution, and other commercial contracts. He has additionally advised equity owners on purchases and sales, business succession, buy-sell agreements, estate planning, and exit strategies. 

• Has prepared over 100 author, illustrator, work-for-hire, collaboration, and related agreements during the past ten years, many of which involved books that have become bestsellers. One project involved the publication of a biography of a mid-20th century broadcast journalism pioneer. On behalf of the family of the late journalist, Leslie assembled the team that produced the biography, including finding a professor of journalism to write the book and a well-known literary agent to present the project to book publishers, and negotiating and preparing a writer’s agreement with the prospective author to prepare the manuscript.
• Has negotiated some 20 derivatives, repurchase, securities forward, and securities lending master agreements over the past several years on behalf of both borrowers and the capital markets group of a New York financial institution. In one transaction involving the refinancing of a $56 million office building mortgage, Leslie helped the borrower lock in a fixed interest rate by entering into an interest rate swap transaction.
• Has represented a seller of extended automobile service contracts in setting up a multi-million-dollar producer-owned reinsurance program for the retention and investment of premium reserves.