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Kevin Blum has spent the last nine years as a clarinetist for the Los Angeles Lawyers Philharmonic, a group composed entirely of lawyers, judges, law students, and legal staff. Blum is good, very good, but he remembers the moment when law school seemed like a much better idea than following in his father’s footsteps of playing professionally (his father played saxophone for many years before changing careers).
“In college, I recognized the difference between me and someone who really should have been playing music for a living,” Blum, vice president of brands and content intellectual property at NBCUniversal, remembers. “I practiced so that I would sound good in a performance. They felt like performances were inconvenient because they were taking them away from the practice room.”
Luckily, he’d find a way to bridge one passion to another. A professor involved in the Grammy Foundation’s “Grammys in the Schools” program got Blum to volunteer and help with an event, exposing him to broader career options in music. Blum ultimately had a conversation with in-house counsel at the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), which convinced him to pursue law with an IP focus.
During Blum’s first summer internship at HBO, he made a brilliant move on his last day. He compiled a list of law firms where the department’s attorneys had started their careers and targeted those firms for his own job search. That list ultimately led him to firm Proskauer Rose after law school at Harvard.
Blum made his move in-house in 2016, initially supporting a diverse mix of business groups including Telemundo, Fandango, NBC Sports, and others. When the parent company acquired DreamWorks and underwent a massive leadership transition that same year, Blum’s career would take an unplanned, but ultimately fruitful, turn. He was reassigned to focus the bulk of his time on the company’s theme parks division, a significant shift that required him to learn an entirely new industry, and fast.
“A great teacher I had always taught us to bloom where we were planted,” the VP remembers. “That always stayed with me, and it’s what I had to do when I started working in theme parks.”
That long journey and tight learning curve culminated on May 22, 2025, with the opening of Universal’s Epic Universe, a project dating back to 2017 and impacted significantly by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There are incredible leaders on this team, and I’m just so grateful to have gotten to work with an exemplary group of individuals.”
Kevin S. Blum
The 110-acre attraction features five themed areas: Celestial Park, Dark Universe, How to Train Your Dragon–Isle of Berk, Super Nintendo World, and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter–Ministry of Magic.
“I got to be involved with Epic Universe from the very beginning,” Blum explains. “I’d gotten to work on Universal Studios Beijing, but this was the first one I got to work on from the first day.”
And yet for a new park that’s going to attract tourists from every corner of the world, Blum spends significantly more time talking about how proud he is of the paralegal team he now leads. The VP says the chance to watch his team develop and grow has provided a level of pride and ownership that surprised him.
“It may be cheesy, but there’s a LinkedIn post I think about a lot,” Blum says. “It says, ‘You’re not a leader until you produce the leader who’s produced a leader who’s produced a leader.’ And I feel that way about this team. They’ve brought so many great ideas and effort to our practice. There are incredible leaders on this team, and I’m just so grateful to have gotten to work with an exemplary group of individuals.”
And while Blum says it’s still strange to have people asking him for advice—“I feel like I just got here myself,” he says—he does have thoughts on making the most of one’s legal career. Namely, people in leadership are people who have said yes. People who say no aren’t often offered the same opportunities. Blum stresses flexibility, adaptability, and, most importantly, blooming where you’re planted, even if it’s on top of a rollercoaster.
Pub Trivia Specialist Goes to Jeopardy!
When Kevin Blum says he enjoys pub trivia, it’s probably at least in part because he tends to leave the competition in the dust. With two small children, the attorney doesn’t have a whole lot of time to devote to a hobby he loves, but his trivia mastery did get a chance to play on the world’s grandest stage: Jeopardy!
Blum only got to make one appearance but finished second on the day for a very good reason: he went up against legendary super-champion Matt Amodio on day ten of his epic thirty-eight-win run, when he netted over $1.5 million.
“There are plenty of great basketball players who got dunked on by Shaq,” Blum says, laughing, “but it was such a fun experience.”
Besides, Blum has bragging rights for any trivia game he enters for the rest of his life.
