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'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.

My legal practice centers on copyright, trademark, and the business structures that support sustainable creative work. I advise artists, galleries, production companies, record labels, and creative agencies—clients generating between $100K and $1M annually who need sophisticated counsel without corporate overhead.

I practice what I call "relational law": legal strategy that protects both your work and the collaborative relationships your business depends on. Traditional IP practice often forces you to choose between defending your rights and preserving working partnerships. I architect solutions that honor both.

I teach Art & Entertainment Law at Queens University of Charlotte, bringing current litigation and real-world contract negotiation into the classroom. I also serve as co-chair of the College Art Association Committee on Intellectual Property, working to influence policy within creative communities rather than just reacting to court decisions.

Law

My art historical training shapes everything I do as a lawyer. When I analyze a copyright dispute, I'm reading images the way I was taught to read paintings—attending to composition, iconography, cultural context, art historical precedent. When I advise on artist agreements, I'm drawing on knowledge of how artists have structured collaborations, commissions, and patronage relationships for centuries.

My doctoral research examined appropriation art and fair use doctrine from the 1990s through the 2010s. That research proved prescient: the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith fundamentally shifted transformative use analysis, validating my central argument that fair use doctrine has created a two-tier system enabling powerful "genius" artists to extract from working creators treated as "raw materials."

Now I'm watching tech companies deploy the exact same legal arguments to justify training AI on copyrighted works without permission or compensation. The pattern is clear: transformative use doctrine, originally crafted to protect artistic expression, has become a tool for capitalist extraction.

This isn't just academic research. Understanding how creative communities actually function—not just how law says they should function—changes the questions I ask and the solutions I propose. When you've traced how legal frameworks enable extraction over decades, you see patterns others miss.

I'm particularly interested in appropriation art, feminist art history, and the political economy of culture. My doctoral examined Richard Prince's appropriation of Patrick Cariou's photographs, Sherrie Levine's re-photographing of Walker Evans, and Jeff Koons's use of commercial imagery—studying not just the legal outcomes but the power dynamics that shaped them. When a celebrity appropriation artist takes from a working photographer and wins on transformative use grounds, that's not just a legal decision. It's a statement about whose creativity counts.

Art history trained me to look at what gets included in the canon and what gets excluded—whose work gets preserved, whose gets forgotten, whose contributions get credited, and whose become invisible. Those questions aren't academic abstractions. They're about power, money, and who gets to tell the story.

Art History

Teaching

Writing

Teaching keeps my practice grounded. Students ask questions that clients wouldn't—questions that force me to examine assumptions I've stopped noticing. And explaining legal concepts to people who don't think like lawyers makes me better at explaining them to clients who shouldn't have to.

My pedagogical approach comes from an unusual place: I began my teaching career in sex education, helping young adults understand consent, boundaries, and healthy relationships. That work fundamentally shaped everything that followed. Both sex education and art law are about self-advocacy, clear communication, and negotiating agreements where power dynamics matter.

I teach students to ask: Who has power in this transaction? Whose interests does this contract serve? What relationships does this agreement create, preserve, or damage? These aren't just legal questions—they're about how creative communities function over time.

I also guest lecture at art schools and residencies (Yale School of Art, McColl Center, others) on contracts for artists, IP fundamentals, and navigating the business side of creative practice. These sessions emphasize practical tools: how to read a licensing agreement, when to negotiate, what terms matter most, when to walk away.

Beyond formal teaching, I speak regularly at industry conferences, professional development workshops, and cultural institutions. Recent topics include fair use in the digital age, AI copyright litigation, artist estate planning, and gallery representation agreements. I'm invited because I can translate complex legal frameworks into accessible strategy without oversimplifying the politics.

Protect Your Magic is my Substack newsletter that examines intellectual property law through a feminist lens. The writing combines legal analysis, art historical research, and cultural criticism—making complex IP frameworks accessible while refusing to simplify the politics.

I also contribute to The Secret Weapon, a LinkedIn newsletter where I translate legal concepts into strategic frameworks for creative professionals. The tone there is more practical, more business-focused—but the underlying analysis remains rigorous.

My writing draws on twenty years of reading across disciplines: art history, legal theory, cultural economics, feminist philosophy, negotiation theory. I'm as likely to cite Linda Nochlin or Silvia Federici as I am to cite court decisions. My arguments are grounded in historical patterns, not just current precedent.

I write the way I practice law: with intellectual precision, without pretension. The goal is clarity, not performance. I assume my readers are intelligent and curious. I don't simplify—I translate.

Recent Public Speaking