Washington, D.C. (July 21, 2026)— Six Oppenheim + Zebrak, LLP (“O+Z”) partners have been named to Billboard magazine’s 2026 Top Music Lawyers list, including Jeff Gould, Nick Hailey, Alex Kaplan, Matt Oppenheim, Jennifer Pariser, and Scott Zebrak. The selection honors lawyers who are at the forefront of the music industry’s most pressing legal concerns.
This is the seventh consecutive year that O+Z has appeared on the list. Billboard states that its Top Music Lawyers List includes attorneys who “guide superstars and industry-driving companies. They negotiate recording deals, global tours and catalog sales, and their legal savvy is essential to the music business now more than ever.”
For the 2026 list, Billboard noted the importance of the music industry’s fight against artificial intelligence (AI) companies that illegally use copyrighted music compositions and lyrics to train their AI models.
“Generative AI tools used in music have evolved by ingesting massive amounts of data about songs originally created — and copyrighted — by songwriters, artists, recording companies and music publishers. It is transformational technology — but some have called it digital theft. What’s undeniable is that the issue has consumed the legal community’s attention in recent years, including many attorneys chosen for Billboard’s 2026 Top Music Lawyers list,” the magazine writes.
O+Z has been at the forefront of the music and publishing industries’ legal efforts to hold AI companies accountable. The firm continues to bring seminal cases related to AI on behalf of brands and creators, including Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO’s cases against Anthropic; two class actions on behalf of major trade, textbook and journal publishers against Meta and Google, for illegally copying millions of copyrighted books and journal articles in training their respective generative AI models; and a suit on behalf of numerous news and magazine outlets against AI company Cohere, alleging that Cohere engaged in widespread unauthorized and unlicensed use of copyrighted content and trademarks.
The full Top Music Lawyers List in the July 18, 2026, issue of Billboard can be found at https://www.billboard.com/pro/top-music-lawyers-2026-billboard-list/.