Laura LeeNick Wilson needed a police escort to get his own tools back.
The guitar maker and owner of Prophecy Instruments, a Baltimore company whose custom guitars sell out every year to musicians around the world, had spent months consulting for a larger Maryland instrument company. The company kept using his designs but stopped paying him. It also held equipment Wilson needed for his own shop and sent him confusing emails and bankruptcy notices.
“It was sort of a debilitating situation for me at the time,” Wilson said.
Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (MDVLA) took his case. Its attorneys drafted his demand letter and filed his complaint. In December 2024, when Wilson had to face the company in Towson District Court, two MDVLA attorneys were at his side. He admits he was a wreck and was grateful for the legal representation.
“They were calm, collected, but supportive, and they knew what to do,” he said. “That presence on its own was a huge help.”
One of those lawyers was Adam Holofcener, JD, MDVLA’s executive director and a 2012 graduate of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. Holofcener, an accomplished guitarist who plays in Mowder Oyal (“Bawlmerese” for motor oil), has been a musician for more than 25 years. Wilson says his knowledge of the guitar world was “instrumental in giving context to the case.” He came away with a settlement and kept his business open.
‘Punk Rock Kid’
For Holofcener, music has always been there. He started out as a self-described “punk rock kid in the suburbs” and in high school he studied jazz with the late Baltimore saxophonist Carl Grubbs. His grandfather, who saw Billie Holiday at the Royal Theatre on Pennsylvania Avenue, passed down his John Coltrane records.
After college in Virginia, he moved to New York to work for Young Audiences New York, a nonprofit that brings arts education into the city’s public schools. He kept making music, moving from jazz and classical guitar to digital samples.
Then someone mentioned copyright, something he had never thought about in almost a decade of making music. A friend gave him a copy of “Free Culture,” Lawrence Lessig’s book about how modern media monopolies use technology and copyright law to stifle innovation.
“For me, the light bulb just went off,” he said.
He started to see access to culture as a civil rights issue, and he realized that none of the many artists he knew understood the law and how it impacted their work.
His Midtown office building was full of arts nonprofits, including Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts New York. Holofcener rode the elevator with its staff every day. Friends had long told him he would make a great lawyer. “Don’t say such horrible things to me,” he used to reply. Now the idea made sense.
He was in law school within months. He chose Maryland Carey Law for in-state tuition and for its clinical program, which offered the chance to practice law, not just study it.
He interned at MDVLA and did policy work for the Future of Music Coalition. For his clinic, he spent a year learning consumer protection law under professor Peter Holland, JD ’92, defending low-income Marylanders sued by companies that buy old debts “for pennies on the dollar.”
Holofcener never set his music aside, even in law school. Being an artist there, he said, was “its own completely insane thing.” During spring break of his first year, he played his first South by Southwest festival, then drove 27 hours straight from Austin to get back to Baltimore in time for class.
“When I left law school, I understood how to do the world infinitely better,” he said. “I have a superpower. And I take that power with an unbelievable amount of responsibility.”
After a consumer protection job in California, he came home in 2014 to lead MDVLA, which was founded in 1985 and had one part-time employee at the time. It now has five full-time staff members and is the third-largest organization of its kind in the country.
MDVLA gives artists and creative entrepreneurs across Maryland the kind of legal help that usually costs hundreds of dollars an hour. It offers monthly art law clinics and workshops that cover the everyday business law that creative work depends on, including contracts, copyrights, trademarks, and setting up an LLC. It also provides free representation by volunteer and staff attorneys. Holofcener calls it the state’s only small business economic development legal services organization, and he defines “creative” broadly. Painters and bands qualify, and so do florists, bakers, and salon owners.
“The first time you step up on stage and receive 50 bucks, you and your band are an unregistered partnership,” he said.
In 2025, MDVLA reached about 1,500 people through 54 workshops and events, gave 130 legal consultations, and paired 54 cases with volunteer attorneys. About half of its clients live in Baltimore City, and the rest come from across the state.
Avenue to Help Artists
Rheagen King has seen the organization from both sides of the table. She met Holofcener at one of those drop-in clinics around 2020. She was a recent Maryland Institute College of Art graduate running a design studio from a two-page contract template, and a difficult client had just shown her that she didn’t own her own work. She had no idea the lawyer across the table ran the organization.
He pointed out problems she hadn’t noticed. Years later, MDVLA rewrote her contract completely. Then MDVLA hired her studio to redesign its brand and its 40th anniversary book, and this year she joined its board.
“Adam is the artist’s attorney,” King said. “For him, being an attorney is an avenue to help the people that he really cares about, which are creatives.”
She sees that same care in the way he leads. Staff members get a day off each week, and in board meetings “everybody’s voice is heard.”
“I’m one of the youngest board members, and I always feel like what I have to say is valued and heard and respected,” she said. “And that’s not something that you see every day.”
Wilson, the custom guitar maker, still turns to MDVLA, and he has sent at least five friends to its clinics.
“Just having that kind of ally to help you navigate a really difficult and foreign environment, that was so invaluable,” Wilson said.
Holofcener’s work also reaches well beyond contracts. In 2022, in Soderberg v. Carrion, MDVLA won a First Amendment ruling that allowed Baltimore filmmakers to release the documentary “I Got a Monster.” But the case he tells with particular delight began with a phone call.
About eight years ago, the clerk’s office at the federal courthouse on Lombard Street reached out because a group of Ocean City street performers had filed a lawsuit without a lawyer. They were challenging 2015 rules that required permits and confined them to small painted squares on the boardwalk.
“The complaint’s a mess, and these people need help,” he recalls being told. “Can you help?”
He and MDVLA board member David Wright refiled the case for about a dozen clients, including a puppeteer, a mime, a magician, and several musicians. The case took years. In 2018, Judge Richard Bennett ruled in Christ v. Town of Ocean City that the boardwalk is a traditional public forum, and he struck down most of the rules.
Holofcener knew right away how he wanted to celebrate. He didn’t throw a party or send out a news release. He went to the beach with his guitar.
“The first thing I did was go to Ocean City,” he said, “and I played a show on the boardwalk.”
