Mark L. Levine

Mark L. Levine, one of the country's leading authorities on book contracts, is a former partner of Boston's Sullivan & Worcester LLP and has also been a publisher and book packager. His latest book is The Trial of the Chicago 7: The Official Transcript, published in October 2020 to coincide with the release of Aaron Sorkin’s film on the trial. He wrote the Contracts Q&A column for the Authors Guild Bulletin from 2006-2016 and is the founder of www.BookContracts.com. He also conducts seminars for non-lawyers on negotiating and on contract law.

Levine has spent virtually his entire legal career drafting and negotiating a broad range of contracts. He has represented major domestic and foreign financial institutions and Fortune 500 corporations in sophisticated corporate and financial transactions in addition to representing authors and agents in publishing matters. He is a former vice president and member of the Board of Directors of the American Book Producers Association.

He is the author of three books, with total sales of more than 200,000 copies. Negotiating a Book Contract: A Guide for Authors, Agents and Lawyers is Levine's third book. He is co-editor of The Tales of Hoffman (Bantam Books 1970), a documentary of courtroom confrontations from the "Chicago 7" conspiracy trial (four printings), and The Complete Book of Bible Quotations (Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster 1986; eight printings). The Trial of the Chicago 7: The Official Transcript, published by Simon & Schuster, is the 50th anniversary edition of The Tales of Hoffman.

He has also successfully published Picture Stories from the Bible ... in Full-Color Comic-Strip Form (over 100,000 copies sold), hardcover reprints of paperback books that were originally published in the 1940s by M.C. Gaines, one of the founders of DC Comics and the father of William M. Gaines, founder of Mad Magazine.

Levine is a graduate of Columbia College, NYU School of Law (where he was a member of Law Review) and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (where he was the recipient of the Louis and Pauline Cowan Award for Excellence in Media Management).

Levine is also an experienced voter protection attorney who has worked for progressive political candidates in New York, New Hampshire, Ohio, Maryland, Missouri, Wisconsin, South Carolina, West Virginia, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Georgia and Mississippi.

He has taught Business Law to graduate students at Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business and a course on Contract Drafting at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

A native of Bath, Maine, he lives in a suburb of New York City.