Katherine de Vos Devine is a lawyer, writer, and teacher who approaches legal challenges the way an art historian approaches a painting—looking for what others miss.

I'm a lawyer for visual artists, writers, filmmakers, and creators. I'm also an entrepreneur who has founded several businesses, and I teach art law and art history at the university level.

Implement Legal is the law firm I founded to help artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creatives navigate the spaces where art meets commerce, where collaboration meets boundaries, and where creation meets protection. Where others see contracts, we see relationships. Where others see risk, we see opportunity to build something sustainable.

Our lawyers have helped hundreds of clients build businesses, protect their creations, and plan their legacies. We bring together education and experience in art, business, and law with something harder to quantify: the ability to see patterns, anticipate needs, and find solutions that feel right, not just legally sound. The firm represents individual artists, arts organizations, collectors, and corporations. Our understanding of multiple perspectives—creator and institution, seller and buyer, individual and entity—helps us think several steps ahead.

I received my PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from Duke University, where my research focused on how artists borrow, transform, and build upon each other's work—questions that feel more urgent than ever in our AI-saturated present. Today, I teach Art and Entertainment Law at Queens University of Charlotte and serve as co-chair of the College Art Association Committee on Intellectual Property.

I've always been drawn to how artists communicate with each other about sharing and boundaries—how creative communities navigate permission, attribution, and collaboration. My teaching career began in sex education, where I helped young adults understand intimacy and healthy relationships. That work shaped everything that followed: today I help artists self-advocate, seek consent, negotiate agreements, and collaborate effectively. I'm particularly interested in how artists are thinking about artificial intelligence, and how law determines authorship and personhood for AI creators.

Lawyer

My PhD dissertation examined appropriation art and fair use—studying the networks of artists who borrowed, remixed, and transformed each other's work from the 1990s through the 2010s. That research continues to inform my practice: understanding how creative communities actually function, not just how law says they should function, changes the questions you ask and the solutions you propose.

I believe that good legal advice requires understanding not just doctrine but culture, not just precedent but context. My art history background isn't decoration—it's fundamental to how I see problems and find paths through them.

Art Historian

Etc.

In my monthly Substack newsletter, Protect Your Magic, I recover lost stories of women innovators to explore the history of intellectual property law. I'm interested in whose work gets remembered, whose contributions get credited, and how those patterns shape the systems we inherit.

Outside of work, I read voraciously and visit museums and galleries as often as I can—because art is best seen in person, and because understanding how artists think requires spending time with what they make. I love espresso, cashmere, and crossword puzzles.

Recent Public Speaking