Writers Guild West Hires New General Counsel After Tony Segall Departs

Longtime Writers Guild of America West general counsel Tony Segall is retiring from the position, the union announced to members on Monday.

As Segall steps into an outside counsel role, in-house WGA West lawyer Sean Graham, currently the director of the union’s agency department, will ascend to the general counsel position. In addition, Jonah J. Lalas — a partner at the labor-focused firm Segall co-founded, Rothner, Segall & Greenstone — will join the union as an outside counsel after previously working on arbitrations for the union.

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“I have been fortunate to work with and learn from Tony throughout my time at the Guild as he has played a role in every part of the Guild’s work, from organizing drives to public policy to negotiations,” WGA West executive director Ellen Stutzman said in the message to members on Monday. “We all owe Tony a great debt for the work he has done on behalf of writers over the last 40 years.”

Segall joined the union in 1992 as primary outside counsel after previously representing the WGA West in a 1984 case against the Department of Labor, which sued the guild over its hyphenate members working as union leaders. Thirteen years later, Segall was promoted to the general counsel role, working alongside then-executive director David Young during an eventful era for the union that included the 2007-8 writers’ strike, the battle against agency packaging practices and multiple minimum basic agreement negotiation cycles. This year, Segall worked on the 148-day WGA strike and contract negotiations.

Incoming general counsel Graham was hired by the WGA West in 2018 as a legal department counsel and was promoted a year later to head the union’s agency department. There, he was “integral to negotiating the new WGA franchise agreement, including the language regulating the private equity owners of the major agencies,” Stutzman wrote to members, and worked on contract enforcement and leveraging information yielded by the agreement. As a member of the senior staff that counseled the WGA’s negotiating committee, Graham played a role in this year’s negotiations; he additionally advised the union’s “rapid response team,” which shut down productions during the 2023 strike. A graduate of UC Berkeley School of Law, Graham previously was a counselor at the Employment Law Center and a lawyer at Weinberg Roger & Rosenfeld.

Lalas joined Rothner, Segall & Greenstone in 2018 after previously working as a labor organizer in California and Texas and clerking for three federal judges. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley School of Law.

The move comes amid a larger changing of the guard within the union’s leadership following the 2023 writers strike. In November, the union named Stutzman to its top staff job as Young, who had been with the union since 2004, departed. As Young went out on medical leave this year, Stutzman additionally served as chief negotiator during the 2023 minimum basic agreement negotiations.

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