OnlyFans Ltd., a video streaming service known for its sexually explicit content, has retained a handful of Big Law firms as outside counsel and assembled an in-house legal team as it faces novel online safety and data privacy concerns.

Keily Blair, a former head of the London-based cybersecurity, privacy, and data innovation practice at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, joined OnlyFans as chief strategy and operations officer in 2022 before being named CEO of the business a year ago. Several other former Orrick lawyers have since joined her at the privately held company, which is owned by billionaire Leonid Radvinsky.

Blair’s ascension to the top leadership job at OnlyFans saw Matthew Reeder, a former managing associate at Orrick who was hired last year as a deputy general counsel, be promoted to fill her former role as operations chief. Reeder, a former judge advocate in the US Marine Corps who has sought to recruit military veterans into Big Law, was subsequently named OnlyFans’ new chief legal officer in July. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.

OnlyFans spokeswoman Sue Beeby said Reeder now oversees a handful of in-house lawyers that include general counsel Craig Hubble, who was hired a year ago, as well as data protection officer, privacy lead, and senior counsel James Hall, commercial counsel Chloe Palios, and junior regulatory and compliance counsel Conor Pope-Moody. Hall and Palios are both former Orrick associates.

Nikhila Raj, a former senior litigation associate at Orrick and ex-federal prosecutor who joined OnlyFans in 2022 as a deputy general counsel and head of its trust, safety, and privacy efforts, left the company earlier this year. Raj, now in a counsel role at Perkins Coie, didn’t respond to a comment request.

Blair, in an interview last week during the Bloomberg Screentime summit in Los Angeles, said OnlyFans has paid $20 billion to its more than 4 million content creators since the company was formed in 2016. During that time OnlyFans saw its business boom amid pandemic-related lockdowns.

The Ukraine-born Radvinsky, who now lives in Florida and controls OnlyFans’ London-based holding company Fenix International Ltd., received $472 million in dividends during its most recent fiscal year, according to a UK financial filing last month. That was a substantial increase from the $338 million Radvinsky received in 2022 and the $284 million he earned the year prior.

Beeby, the OnlyFans spokeswoman, said its outside counsel roster includes Orrick and other large firms such as Cooley; Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; and Winston & Strawn. Orrick helped OnlyFans affiliate Fenix defeat a putative class action this year, while Winston is handling a biometric privacy case for the company. Quinn Emanuel got a jurisdictional win last year for Fenix in another dispute involving performers who claimed they were incentivized to suppress traffic to social media rivals.

OnlyFans has tapped Skadden to advise it in another lawsuit related to “chatters,” or individuals pretending to be content creators on the platform.

Public records show that Cooley and New Jersey’s Myers Wolin have done trademark work for OnlyFans. The Vogel Group, a Washington-based government affairs firm, has also been paid $360,000 by Fenix through the first three quarters of this year to advocate for OnlyFans on “issues concerning social media companies,” according to federal lobbying filings.

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