Josie Leinart’s acting chops serve her well in law and on social media
The best actors make it look easy. Josie Leinart knows there’s more to it.
“A lot of people don’t give actors enough credit for working hard,” says Leinart, a corporate and sports attorney whose credits under the name Josie Loren include appearances in film (17 Again), television (Hannah Montana, NCIS, The Mentalist), and a four-year starring turn in the teenage gymnast series Make It or Break It.
“My god, it is hard work,” she says. “It is countless hours of being in scene, study class, poring over your auditions, going to get coached on the three auditions that you have the next day. Then you get home and your agent calls: You have another two tomorrow, and now you’re up all-night studying for those auditions. It’s a lot of study.”
Meaning it’s good practice for law school?
“Totally!” she says. “The other side of it is, actors are, for the most part, extroverted. I am. They’re go-getters. They are great at talking to people, networking. That is part of law, too, a part you don’t learn in law school, but it’s an integral part of the legal profession.”
Leinart, who attended Loyola in Los Angeles at night and graduated in 2019, now practices at Munck Wilson Mandala with a focus on NIL: name, image, likeness.
“It’s just sophisticated commercial transactions,” she says of the new practice area that came into being following the U.S. Supreme Court’s NCAA v. Alston ruling in 2021. “And to do that, and do it well, you need to know transactional law. You need to know corporate law. I learned the ropes doing mergers and acquisitions and asset purchases and entity formation and drafting of agreements.”
Not content to let the work come to her, she and fellow attorney Tasha Schwikert Moser launched @weare_nil on Instagram and TikTok, where the duo has become go-to advisers for all things NIL.
“Now I work in social media as, I guess, an influencer,” says Leinart, “and I can’t tell you how cringy that sounds.”
Even so, her social media followers can’t get enough of the content created by her and husband Matt Leinart, who won the Heisman Trophy as a quarterback for USC and played six seasons in the NFL.
“Because I work in that space, and my husband now works heavily in that space, and I review all of his agreements, and also, of course, all of mine, I know the marketplace; I know the industry,” says Leinart, a mother to two children with another on the way, and stepmom to a teenage son. “I know what the value is for a post of someone who has 100,000 followers versus a million. I know just how these social media platforms work. I’ve kind of become the person that everyone looks to when there’s a question about NIL.”
Born and raised in Miami, Leinart was inspired to go into law in part by the career of her older brother Javier Lopez, whom she calls “a big-shot litigator down in South Florida.” She studied musical theater at the New World School of the Arts in Miami, and pursued a career in TV and film during her undergraduate years at UCLA. There was both good and bad to the industry, she says, but it ultimately left her unfulfilled. Ironically, she became a bigger star once she left show business—on social media.
“It was the last thing that I ever expected to be,” she says. “People stop us on the street all the time and are like, ‘Oh, we follow you on Instagram,’ or ‘You’re from TikTok.’ It’s weird. We’re getting that more and more, rather than ‘Oh, you played football,’ or ‘Oh, you were an actress.’”
But she likes the creativity involved. “Sometimes it’s quite elaborate,” she says, “and you’re writing a script and you’re figuring out the best way to film it. I had to learn how to edit things, and I found that process really fun.”
So would she ever return to acting?
“I’d welcome any opportunity,” she says. “I don’t close doors like that. And yes, sometimes I miss it. Let me tell you, there were times in law school when I was like, ‘What am I thinking?’”
But regrets about going into law? “None,” she says.
This article was published in 2025 Southern California Super Lawyers magazine. To view the article online, click here.