Establishing the position
Working out what the band actually was, what it owns, and what each member owns individually, before anyone takes a position they cannot hold.
Music
Band splits and line up changes.
A band that ends, or that loses a member, produces a set of questions nobody wanted to ask while it was working. Who keeps the name, what a departing member takes with them, and who owns the recordings and the songs. These are almost always asked for the first time after the relationship has broken down, and almost always there is nothing in writing.
What this looks like when it goes wrong
The name is the first fight and usually the largest. Two members continue, one leaves, and both sides begin announcing themselves under the name the audience knows. Bookings get made against both. Promoters and festivals, who want no part of it, deal with whoever they dealt with last, and a practical answer starts to set hard before anybody has established the legal one.
Then the catalogue. Songs written in a room together, credited by habit rather than by agreement, and recordings paid for by whoever had money that month. Nobody wrote the split down because writing it down would have been an odd thing to do at the time. Years later a credit entered casually on a file is doing work it was never meant to do.
Then the assets nobody thought of as assets. The socials, the mailing list, the domain, the merchandise stock, the artwork, the unreleased material and whatever the band's company holds. These sit wherever they happened to be put, which is usually with the member who set them up, and that is not always the member the others assume.
The version that causes the most damage is the quiet one. A member drifts out without a conversation, the band carries on, and nothing is said for years. Nothing was resolved, so everything remains open, and it reopens at the moment there is money in it: a sync request, a reissue, a catalogue sale, or a reunion.
What actually decides it
What the band actually was. Where people work together with a view to profit and nothing is written down, the arrangement between them is frequently a partnership whether or not anybody chose one, or a company where one was set up, or no more than a series of individual arrangements sitting alongside each other. Which of those it is drives who owns what, and it is settled by what the members actually did rather than by what they would now prefer.
The absence of an agreement is the normal starting position, not the exception. It is not evidence that anybody behaved badly. Bands form as friendships and turn into businesses without a moment at which anyone thought to paper it. So the answer gets assembled from conduct: how income was shared, whose money bought what, in whose name things were registered, how the members held themselves out, and what everyone accepted for years without objecting.
The name and the songs fail separately. The right to the name is a brand question, decided by ownership of any registration, by the goodwill and who the public associates the name with, and by whatever the members agreed or can be shown to have accepted. The songs and the recordings are copyright questions, decided by authorship, by ownership of the recording, and by any assignment. A member can be entitled to keep touring under the name and still own only part of the catalogue, or own a great deal of the catalogue and have no right to the name at all.
Contribution is not the same as authorship, and neither is the same as a share of the money. Writing together produces joint ownership of the underlying work, which is a different thing from a performer's rights in the recording, which is different again from however the band's income was actually divided. Where those three have quietly drifted apart over years, that drift is the dispute.
What we do
The name
Resolving who is entitled to continue using it, and securing or challenging the registrations and goodwill that decide the question.
Catalogue and credits
Sorting authorship, recording ownership and credits, including where the record has been wrong for years and nobody corrected it.
Separation agreements
Papering a departure or a wind up so the arrangement ends once, rather than reopening every time the catalogue earns something.
Assets and accounts
Recovering or dividing socials, domains, mailing lists, stock, artwork and unreleased material.
The contested version
Handling a dispute that is not going to settle quietly, with regulated partners where proceedings are required.
When to spend nothing
Where a band is still working, the cheapest hour anybody will ever spend on this is the one that writes down who owns the name and how songs are credited, while everyone still likes each other. It is a short document, it costs a fraction of the argument it prevents, and it is the single thing that most reliably stops a split from becoming a case.
Where a band has already ended quietly and nothing is earning, doing nothing is frequently correct. Reopening a settled silence to establish a position over a catalogue that generates almost nothing spends real money on a theoretical entitlement. The moment to act is when there is something to act over: an approach for a sync, a reissue, a sale, or somebody using the name in a way that takes from you.
Before anything is sent
Positions harden the moment the other side takes advice, and the quiet routes stop being available once a demand has gone out. While nothing has been sent, everything is still open.