Kanye West‘s New York City law firm has successfully served the rapper with documents to drop him as a client after not being able to locate him for months.
According to AllHipHop, new court documents filed by Greenberg Traurig, LLP show that the firm was successfully cut ties with West as of Wednesday (February 1), which the firm had requested to do on November 30 of last year.
In the new filing, attorney Nina D. Boyajian stated that her office was able to coordinate personal service of the documents with some support from Ye’s new attorney.
“On January 18, 2023, an attorney based in California contacted my firm advising that he would be representing ‘Ye on some of his legal matters,’” she wrote in the court documents. “During the course of several emails and a phone call with this attorney, I requested that he coordinate personal service of the Order on Ye.”
Boyajian continued: “On February 1, 2023, the attorney referenced above emailed me the executed Certificate of Service attached hereto as Exhibit A. I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America that the foregoing is true and correct.”
As recently as last month, Greenberg Traurig claimed that they had been unable to locate Kanye West to officially serve him with paperwork to sever their working relationship. The firm went so far as to request the courts recognize a public announcement in in Los Angeles-area papers as sufficient notice to the embattled artist.
AllHipHop previously reported that Greenberg Traurig had taken out a pair of newspapers ads to publicly renounce its association with Kanye. The move was described as a “multi-pronged approach” designed to notify him of the judge’s order allowing the firm to drop him as a client.
“Publication of the Withdrawal Order’s contents in two Los Angeles-area newspapers, where Ye appears to reside, will also apprise him of the Withdrawal Order,” the legal filing reads.
However, United States District Judge Analisa Torres denied the request to make the separation official on grounds that she did not feel confident that Nina D. Boyajian and her colleagues had done all they could to reach their now former client directly.
Greenberg Traurig had been repping Ye in his copyright infringement case against Ultra International Music Publishing (UIMP) over the unauthorized use of a Donda 2 sample.
A complaint filed in U.S. District Court in New York in last June claimed that Kanye’s song “Flowers” sampled Marshall Jefferson’s 1986 Chicago house hit “Move Your Body” (a.k.a. “The House Music Anthem”) without proper permission or compensation. Ultra International Music Publishing is Jefferson’s publisher.
The suit further stated that Ye acknowledged that he sampled “Move Your Body” without authorization, yet “continue[s] to willfully infringe in blatant disregard of UIMP’s rights of ownership.”
Greenberg Traurig aren’t the only ones that have had trouble tracking Ye down in recent months, as he’s been somewhat off the grid since the start of 2023. His former business manager, Thomas St. John, has also been unable to reach the polarizing rap star after recently suing him for breach of contract.
St. John claims that his and West’s professional relationship began in March 2022, when the rapper agreed to keep him on a monthly retainer of $300,000 as payment to be his business manager and the Chief Marketing Officer of all things related to the Donda brand.
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