About the firm

Kelem Law Corp was founded by Whitney Kelem with the mission of working directly with creatives to help them confidently navigate the nuances and challenges of business and legal issues in the nonfiction production space. Whitney is a former in-house business and legal affairs executive with over a decade of experience in unscripted and documentary production, who started her career at Eyeworks USA working on reality television series such as Bar Rescue, Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition and Splash. She then worked as the Vice President and head of Business & Legal Affairs for VICELAND, the VICE cable network channel (now VICE TV), where she helped launch the network from scratch. There she collaborated with creatives to advise on the legal intricacies of innovative, unconventional and provocative series such as Weediquette, Black Market, F*ck, That’s Delicious, Desus & Mero and Hamilton’s Pharmacopia. She also helped their marketing team figure out the legalities of launching a spliff into space. After VICE she joined Netflix’s documentary film & television team, where she focused on the EMEA and US territories working with production companies in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the US on projects such as Fyre, The Tinder Swindler, Angèle, Grégory, and Unsolved Mysteries.

Whitney received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, San Diego and her Juris Doctor from Loyola New Orleans, College of Law, and is admitted to the State Bar of California. A native Southern Californian, she loves to spend her free time going to see live music, exploring the world of natural wine, checking out new restaurants and working on her French.

Her goal is for her clients to see their legal advisor as an empowering asset and not a roadblock to the execution of their vision: to help filmmakers figure out the legal “how” no matter how challenging the idea, and to ensure her clients feel confident in the economics of their deal terms.