Maitre Ismay Marcais

Maître Ismay Marçais is an Avocat à la Cour at the Paris Bar and the driving force behind ART AVOCATS, a boutique practice specialising in business law and intellectual property. At the Corporate INTL Global Awards 2025, the firm was recognised as Copyright Law Firm of the Year in France, an award that reflects its concentrated expertise at the meeting point of copyright, the arts and the cultural and creative industries.

Admitted to the Paris Bar in 2006, Ms Marçais has built a practice that is unusually focused on the legal questions arising from creativity, culture and the art market. Operating from the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris, the firm advises artists, creators, institutions and businesses whose value lies in intangible works and reputations. Its work spans copyright and intellectual property in the broad sense, but it is the firm's command of the specific legal cultures of art, music and audiovisual production that has given it its distinctive profile within the French market.

Copyright, or droit d'auteur, sits at the heart of the award-winning practice. French copyright law is among the most protective and doctrinally rich in the world, encompassing both the economic rights that allow creators to exploit their works and the moral rights that safeguard the integrity of a work and its connection to its author. ART AVOCATS advises on the full life cycle of these rights, from the audit and valuation of catalogues and rights chains to the negotiation of exploitation agreements and the defence of works against infringement. In music, the firm handles catalogues, rights audits and counterfeiting; in film and audiovisual matters, it audits chains of rights and negotiates the terms on which works are exploited; and across performer rights and digital distribution it helps clients understand and protect their interests in an increasingly online marketplace.

The firm's expertise extends naturally into the art market, where Ms Marçais advises on questions of counterfeiting, forgery and due diligence, and into trademark work for museums, artists and luxury houses. This breadth allows the practice to serve clients whose concerns rarely fall neatly within a single discipline, and whose most valuable assets are often reputational and creative rather than purely commercial. The firm has drawn external recognition for this work, holding well-regarded rankings in art-market law and cinema law and strong recognition in music law from French legal directories including Décideurs Magazine and the Journal du Management.

Ms Marçais places a clear emphasis on the manner in which advice is delivered as well as its substance. She is described as prioritising high-quality legal counsel combined with genuine availability, developing strategies in close collaboration with clients and maintaining strict confidentiality throughout. For creators, collectors, institutions and companies whose interests can be highly personal and reputationally sensitive, this combination of technical depth and discreet, hands-on service is central to the firm's appeal, and it distinguishes a specialist boutique from larger, less focused practices.

Through ART AVOCATS, Ismay Marçais has assembled a practice that speaks the language of the creative and cultural sectors while commanding the rigour of French intellectual property law. The Corporate INTL Global Awards 2025 recognition as Copyright Law Firm of the Year in France affirms both the firm's specialist standing and the confidence it inspires among clients in the art, music and audiovisual worlds. For those seeking to protect, exploit or defend creative works in France, the firm offers a rare concentration of copyright expertise delivered with a strong sense of the artistic and commercial context in which such works exist.