AS ATTORNEYS for a range of art-collecting clients, from those who merely dabble in the market to those who have made a Gagosian amount of money buying and selling art, we find that we give the same ironclad advice over and over: Your art investment is potentially worthless if you fail to protect it legally. Moreover, without the proper protocols in place, you stand to lose more than your purchase price in the event of a legal challenge. Many pitfalls, from issues of authenticity to ownership disputes, can be avoided with proper legal procedures. In the hope that you end up like Larry G-and not as a cautionary tale in one of our future columns-we have answered a few of the most common investment-related legal questions from our e-mail inbox.

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One of the nice things about our art-law specialty is that we routinely field oddball legal questions from clients (Still planning to bequeath the Schnabel to your schnauzer, Mrs. R?). Occasionally, though, we meet someone truly peculiar, like Robin, a young sculptor with an ominous fixation. Continue reading →

Although we’d like to think that our clients would be totally lost without us, we have found that many can actually teach us a thing or two. A case in point is Ernest, who inadvertently gave us a crash course in the law of abandoned art. Continue reading →

Thank you for reading Brothers in Law. We are giving a pop quiz today on what constitutes good title to art. Please close your books and take out your pencils. Continue reading →

Bunny G. (not her real initial) appeared in our office hopping mad. She had been the personal assistant (not her real function) to a famous sculptor, Max (no real reason for a parenthetical). Bunny now wanted to sell a signed sculpture her employer had given her shortly before his death. Continue reading →

Faithful readers of our column (Hi, Mom!) know that we usually manage to find interesting legal topics in the art world to discuss and distort. This month, however, we ran out of story ideas. Rather than disappoint our editors, we Continue reading →

Since one of our favorite activities is lunch, it’s not surprising that among our best clients are famous chefs. But when they dabble in the art world, some can find themselves in a jam — and that’s where we come in. Continue reading →

Some thought our client Vinnie was nuts, but we preferred to think of him as merely impressionable, or perhaps just absinthe-minded. The Parisian painter e-mailed us in a panic with a pressing problem: He had consigned pictures to several American galleries and was terrified that if they suddenly went bust (as famously happened to dealer Salander O’Reilly), Continue reading →