His clients include superstars and top record companies and their executives. In 1992 Business Week reported that he was considered "the most powerful lawyer in the music business," and in 2001Newsweek called him "perhaps the music industry's wealthiest and most powerful attorney".
Biography
Grubman was born in and grew up in Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, New York. He attended City College of New York, where he earned a B.B.A. While attending Brooklyn Law School, where he earned a J.D., he worked in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency and as a CBS page. After graduating from Brooklyn Law School in 1967, he wrote various lawyers asking for a job. When an attorney named Walter Hofer met with him, he recalled: "I didn't know what to say, so I tried to get him to like me. I said, 'I really want to work for you, but I don't come from a very wealthy family, so I can't afford to pay you very much to hire me.'" Hofer hired him to work in his music law firm as an associate for $125-per-week. Grubman subsequently started his own business. In the 1970s, he signed obscure disco artists who later became popular, and thereafter he signed a number of stars. Grubman started a firm with fellow Brooklyn Law School graduates Paul Schindler and Arthur Indursky in 1974, and upon Schindler's departure the firm was known as Grubman Indursky & Shire. In 1982 he landed one of his biggest clients, Bruce Springsteen. In 2005, the firm had grown to 30 attorneys. In 1992 Business Week reported that Grubman was considered "the most powerful lawyer in the music business." In 2001, Newsweek called him "perhaps the music industry's wealthiest and most powerful attorney". His clients have included Springsteen, Madonna, U2, John Mellencamp, Rod Stewart, Sean "Puffy" Combs, Luther Vandross, Elton John, Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. In May 2020, a hacker group claimed to have hacked and downloaded a huge amount data from Grubman's law firm, and demanded $42 million ransom to prevent release of data.
Family
After graduating from law school, he met his first wife, Yvette Fischer Grubman. She divorced him in 1988 after 19 years of marriage, and died of cancer in 2001 at the age of 58. They had two daughters, their elder being Lizzie Grubman, a celebrity publicist. Their younger daughter Jennifer Grubman Rothenberg holds a BA from Boston University and a J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, is President of Innovative Philanthropy, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Cardozo Law School. Grubman remarried in 1991, at the New York Public Library. His second wife is Debbie Grubman, a Manhattan real-estate broker.
