I've sat in every chair at this table except yours.
For years I was General Counsel of Greenleaf Book Group, the hybrid publisher behind hundreds of business books, executive memoirs, and bestsellers by founders and leaders. My job was deciding which books the house could safely publish, which manuscripts needed surgery first, and what happened when legal found a problem after the pub date was announced. I've been a guest on Greenleaf's podcast twice, once talking about exactly the kind of manuscript risk review I now offer, back when I was giving the advice away rather than selling it. Both episodes are below; hear the approach for yourself before you ever pay me a dollar.
Here is what that job actually looked like. I blocked books from coming in the door because the content was risky and had never been cleared. I blocked books already deep in production and editorial over clearance problems that could easily have been prevented. And I approved the somewhat risky books that met our risk tolerance, on conditions I set: legal and libel reviews, attorney review letters, and media liability insurance naming the publisher as an additional insured. I know the game inside and out because I wrote the policies and I was the one enforcing them.
I also trained our editorial staff to spot potentially problematic content, and advised them directly on how to clear it with releases and permissions or how to rewrite it to mitigate the risk, many times writing the fix myself. And behind all of it sat the contract: the representations and warranties, the indemnification, the limitation of liability. I know those clauses because I rewrote them for maximum protection as soon as I started at the publishing company, based on intimate knowledge of real lawsuits and real litigation, not the arm's length guess of a media or publishing attorney who has never stepped foot in a courtroom or filed a suit.
I work on everything from the end, back. I look at every manuscript as if I'm presenting it to a judge and jury, then work my way backward to make the odds of winning that moment, if it ever comes, as high as possible. Nobody can guarantee that no one sues or makes a claim, because anyone can claim anything. The goal is to stack every brick we can in your legal wall of defense, so their odds of success go down and yours go up.
I watched authors do the hardest part, write the true thing, and then watched launches freeze, print runs sit in warehouses, and signing tables stand empty while lawyers argued about a paragraph. The authors always described the same feeling. The lawsuit fear was abstract. The embarrassment, the texts from friends asking where the book was, the launch month spent explaining instead of celebrating, that part was immediate and personal.
Before that, I ran legal for a technology company, living inside the commercial contracts, NDAs, and settlement agreements that quietly follow executives around, the same documents that now show up with opinions about what their signers can publish.
Today I run one practice with two divisions, and both work the same body of law. A tort is a civil wrong, an injury one person's conduct inflicts on another that the law remedies with money damages, and tort law is where my whole practice lives. In court, the torts I litigate are personal injury cases, brought for people hurt after somebody got a decision wrong. Defamation, invasion of privacy, false light, and misappropriation belong to that same family, and those are the injuries Muller Media Law exists to prevent rather than to litigate. The work is complementary: because I spend my days proving how one person's conduct injured another, I read your manuscript the way the lawyer on the other side would read it, and I fix what I find before anyone can file. One division answers injuries. The other prevents them. Seeing the whole board is the point.
The publishing world runs on relationships, and mine are current. I work closely with freelance editors, book coaches, designers, and vendors across the book publishing industry, and I'm glad to connect you with the right ones for your project.
I work from San Antonio, Texas, licensed in Texas, clearing books for authors nationwide against the strictest standards their book could face anywhere in the country, because that's where a national book actually lives.
You did the brave part already. You wrote it down.
For the ones with a story to tell.
Verify all of it: my State Bar of Texas record confirms the license and bar number, and my LinkedIn profile confirms the General Counsel role at Greenleaf Book Group.
Manuscript Clearance. Cleared, or it's free.
For the ones with a story to tell.