Ye finally got new lawyers after ghosting the ones who dropped him following his antisemitic rants
- Ye, aka Kanye West, got new lawyers months after ghosting his old ones.
- He's now lawyered up in three lawsuits against him, court records show.
Ye has finally lawyered up.
Months after ghosting his previous lawyers, the artist — who has also gone by Kanye West — has a new set of attorneys for three different lawsuits against him.
On Tuesday, lawyers filed notices stating they're representing him in lawsuits over alleged uncredited music samples and over allegedly unpaid bills to his former business manager, according to court records reviewed by Insider.
The attorney Peter D. Hawkes at the Portland, Oregon-based Angeli Law Group is representing Ye in the music samples case, which is based in a New York court. A music publisher alleges Ye used a sample from a song it owns for his song "Flowers," purported to be about his relationship with Kim Kardashian, without proper credit or paying for licensing rights. Hawkes decline to comment.
Three lawyers at the Santa Fe, California-based firm Weeks Nelson are representing Ye in a lawsuit brought by Thomas St. John, a business management firm. The company alleges the artist owes it $4.5 million after he reneged on an agreement to manage his finances. The attorneys at Weeks Nelson didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. Filings from Thomas St. John show the firm tried to serve Ye with the lawsuit since October without success.
Court records also show that Ye got two new lawyers for a California lawsuit alleging he underpaid and overworked people who worked on his 2019 opera "Nebuchadnezzar," to the tune of $6 million. The lawyers, Justin Morello and London Meservy, didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
The lawyers will likely help Ye avoid default judgments in those cases, where he risked losing automatically without any representation in court. But they must also navigate a famously intemperate client, who once wore a bizarre mask and refused to answer questions for a deposition in 2021.
The firm Greenberg Traurig LLP formerly handled most of Ye's legal affairs, but they cut ties with him following a series of antisemitic tirades he made last fall.
Lawyers at Greenberg Traurig asked judges overseeing their lawsuits to allow them to drop Ye as a client, but they were forced to spend months trying to chase him down after he ghosted them. Ye stopped answering their calls and text messages, changed his number, and no longer showed up at addresses associated with him, Greenberg Traurig said in court filings.