Janet Moreira: Builds legal specialty on name, image and likeness usage

Janet Moreira moved to Miami during the final semester of law school in 2001 for an externship at a small Coral Gables firm, expecting it to be a temporary stop before returning north. Instead, she stayed, passed the Florida Bar, and built her entire legal career in South Florida as intellectual property law was beginning to evolve from a niche corporate practice into a core pillar of modern business strategy.

Today, Ms. Moreira is a partner at Caldera Law, where she focuses on trademarks, brand protection and name, image and likeness (NIL) matters for athletes, entertainers, influencers and businesses navigating an increasingly complex digital economy. Her work sits at the intersection of law, branding and the rapidly expanding creator economy, where individuals themselves are increasingly the brands being built, managed and monetized.

Her path into intellectual property began through marketing, where she became interested in how a single word, symbol or image could carry an entire brand identity. She worked as a paralegal before attending law school at night, eventually transitioning into practice and gravitating toward intellectual property as the space where creativity and federal legal structure most clearly intersect.

As she entered practice in the early 2000s, the field itself was shifting, as digital piracy and emerging domain name disputes forced companies to rethink how brands were protected in an increasingly online world. Over time, she built her expertise across litigation and boutique practices, including a decade running her own firm, Maven IP, where she focused on trademark strategy, international brand protection and enforcement while also experiencing firsthand the realities of building a brand as a business owner.

She joined Caldera Law in 2023, expanding her practice as NIL legislation accelerated the transformation of athlete and creator branding. The NCAA had lifted its longstanding restrictions on NIL compensation just two years prior, allowing college athletes to monetize their personal brands for the first time without jeopardizing their eligibility.

Much of her current work involves guiding student athletes and their families through that new reality.

She advises on trademark protection, contract negotiations, licensing deals and digital identity management, often before athletes fully realize they are already participating in the NIL ecosystem through social media, recruitment exposure, tournaments and highlight content.

Ms. Moreira emphasizes that NIL is no longer a future consideration for student athletes but a present-day reality, particularly in talent-rich regions like Miami and South Florida that continue to produce elite athletes while also attracting brands, collectives and entertainment opportunities that increasingly treat athletes as commercial identities from an early stage.

Looking ahead, she sees intellectual property and NIL law entering another period of rapid change.

Federal regulation around NIL remains in flux, while emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence are raising new questions around identity, voice replication and digital likeness rights. She notes that existing trademark frameworks were not designed to fully address these evolving forms of misappropriation, suggesting that future legal protections will likely need to expand.

For Ms. Moreira, however, the through line remains consistent: protecting identity, whether corporate or personal, in a world where branding has become inseparable from livelihood. In South Florida’s fast-growing sports and entertainment ecosystem, she sees that work only becoming more central.

Ms. Moreira spoke with Miami Today reporter Genevieve Bowen.

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