A trove of photos, including the famous Marilyn Monroe up-draft photo are the res over which the Shaw family fought for years.  Father against son, sisters against brother… Finally it ended, with an Appellate Decision which sets forth the attorney rights to billing, doubling of bills and judiciary law liens.

"Over the course of his photographic career, Sam Shaw took thousands of pictures of celebrities, including the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blowing upward. In 1994, he commenced an action against his son Larry, also a photographer, for conversion of over 200,000 commercially valuable photographic images and related claims, and sought a declaration of ownership rights, an accounting of the images, unspecified compensatory damages, and $100 million in punitive damages (the Shaw family action). Larry, contending that Sam had gifted or assigned rights in the photographs to him, and that he, not Sam, had shot some of them, raised ten counterclaims. In 1995, Supreme Court dismissed several of the counterclaims, but in 1998 granted Larry the right to examine all 500,000 photographs in Sam’s possession.

Upon Sam’s death in April 1999, Supreme Court appointed his daughters, Edith Shaw Marcus and Meta Shaw Stevens (collectively, the Shaw sisters), temporary administrators to prosecute the action against Larry, and appointed a receiver of the 500,000 photographs that had been in Sam’s possession. The receiver stored the photographs in a warehouse, where they were damaged. The receiver filed a $2 million claim with the insurer, which filed for bankruptcy protection; the claim was turned over to the New York State Liquidation Bureau and assigned to an adjuster, but remains unresolved. The charging liens also attach to any insurance proceeds for damage to photographic images while in storage. The "enforcement of a charging lien is founded upon the equitable notion that the proceeds of a settlement are ultimately under the control of the court, and the parties within its jurisdiction, [and the court] will see that no injustice is done to its own officers’" (Schneider, Kleinick, Weitz, Damashek & Shoot v City of New York, 302 AD2d 183, 187 [2002], quoting Rooney v Second Ave. R.R. Co., 18 NY 368, 369 [1858]). "The statute is remedial in character, and hence should be construed liberally in aid of the object sought by the legislature, which was to furnish security to attorneys by giving them a lien upon the subject of the action" (Fischer-Hansen v Brooklyn Hgts. R.R. Co., 173 NY 492, 499 [1903]). The lien is imposed on the client’s cause of action, in whatever form it may take during the course of litigation, and follows the proceeds, wherever they may be found (see Matter of Cohen v Grainger, Tesoriero & Bell, 81 NY2d 655, 658 [1993]). "