Joleen Winther Hughes, Founder and Principal

Joleen Winther Hughes founded HMLG specifically to support entrepreneurs and inventors, both big and small, with new business ventures, business and legal strategy and burgeoning media properties, products and services.  As a longtime entrepreneur herself, Joleen understands the trials and tribulations of starting and running a successful business and how to allocate and assess risk to get products and services to market.  Joleen takes pride in providing legal and business advice to clients to help transform a good idea into a sustainable company.  She has set HMLG up specifically to enable clients to set and maintain workable legal budgets and to depend on great communication and interaction with her extraordinary legal team.

Before embarking in private practice, Joleen was Senior Counsel at RealNetworks, Inc. for many years at the inception of the digital media era, where she provided a broad array of business and legal affairs services for the company’s global media operations.  Joleen participated in the company’s largest transactions in the consumer services/digital media space including forming MusicNet, the first legal multi-label music distribution initiative, putting together the first VOD digital movie subscription service, and drafting and negotiating agreements with major sports leagues, media companies, television networks, movie studios and record labels to create the first on-line consumer content subscription products and services.  She was also responsible for developing Real’s casual gaming licensing strategy. 

Joleen began her entrepreneural career in the music industry, where she owned a successful artist management, talent booking, concert production, and special event business during the height of the Seattle "grunge" music explosion for clients including RKCNDY nightclub, Susan Silver and Kelly Curtis Management (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees), Media One, Monqui/SLA, The Pioneer Square Pub Club and The University of Washington. 

She also currently co-owns the Celtic Swell Irish Pub & Restaurant with her husband,  located on Alki Beach in Seattle, Washington.

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