Simon Frankel is a partner with Covington & Burling LLP in San Francisco, where his civil litigation practice focuses on copyright and trademark litigation, technology and Internet privacy disputes, and legal issues related to visual art. He has handled a wide variety of art-related disputes, including copyright and moral rights litigation, cultural property claims, and suits under California’s resale royalties statute. Mr. Frankel has represented the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in two significant cultural property disputes, one concerning ownership of a valuable Austrian expressionist painting that changed hands in Vienna in 1939 and the other involving an attempt to attach Persian antiquities held by the museum in order to enforce a judgment against the Government of Iran. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston v. Seger-Thomschitz (1st Cir. 2010); Rubin v. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (D. Mass. 2011).

Mr. Frankel is a graduate of Harvard College (B.A), the University of Cambridge (M. Phil.), and Yale Law School (J.D.) and has taught art law at Berkeley Law School, Hastings College of the Law, and the University of San Francisco School of Law. He frequently writes and speaks on copyright and legal issues related to art.