On the docket today
- Last-second peace: The case resolved in open court just before jurors were to be selected, ending a years-long duel over authorship and ownership of early recordings.
- Two suits, one question: Terry Williams sought joint-author status; Missy Elliott countered with a mirror action seeking a declaration that the recordings are hers alone.
- A practical lesson: Bifurcation bids are no silver bullet; the judge kept both tracks together, pushing the parties toward the reality check of a jury trial.
USA HERALD (August 23, 2025) — Sometimes the smartest legal move happens in the hallway outside the courtroom, not inside it.
That’s exactly what unfolded Friday morning in Philadelphia federal court, where rap icon Missy Elliott and producer Terry Williams settled their bitter copyright dispute literally minutes before a jury would have been seated to decide who owns decades-old recordings that sparked dueling lawsuits.
U.S. District Judge Nitza Quinones Alejandro delivered the news to a pool of potential jurors who had already gathered for what promised to be a fascinating clash over music industry authorship. “The attorneys and Mr. Williams have talked and they have resolved the case,” Judge Alejandro announced after multiple hushed sidebar conferences that stretched the morning’s proceedings.
The settlement terms remain sealed—both sides immediately clamped down when approached for comment—but the timing tells us everything about litigation strategy. Nobody settles this close to trial unless the alternative looks far worse.
Here’s what was at stake: Williams claimed he co-authored songs Elliott recorded at his home studio over 30 years ago, alleging those compositions were later “rearranged and featured” on SISTA’s 1994 album “4 All the Sistas Around da World.” SISTA was Elliott’s group before she became the Grammy-winning solo artist we know today.
Elliott’s legal team painted a completely different picture in their pretrial memorandum: “Williams did not write a single lyric or in any manner contribute to any of the songs featured on the studio SISTA album… Elliott did not even know of or meet Williams until after the production on the ‘SISTA’ album was completed and the album was publicly released in 1994.”
That’s a scorched-earth denial, the kind that usually means someone’s heading to trial.
But here’s where this case gets interesting from a damages perspective: Elliott’s lawyers argued Williams could only prove $27 in streaming revenue from 2012 to present. Twenty-seven dollars. Williams, representing himself, had originally demanded $113,622 in compensatory damages plus over $1 million in punitive damages.
The math didn’t add up, and Elliott’s team knew it.
Earlier in the litigation, Elliott tried to get Judge Alejandro to bifurcate the cases—handle Elliott’s declaratory judgment action first, then tackle Williams’ claims. Smart strategy: if Elliott won ownership outright, Williams’ suit would collapse. But Judge Alejandro saw through that maneuver and denied the request, rejecting Elliott’s assertion that the underlying facts weren’t disputed.
That denial likely pushed both sides toward settlement. When a federal judge tells you the facts are genuinely in dispute, it means you’re heading to trial with real uncertainty.
Williams represented himself throughout—never ideal when facing sophisticated entertainment lawyers like Michael A. Trauben and Thomas K. Richards from Singh Singh & Trauben LLP. Pro se litigants can win, but they rarely survive the procedural maze of federal copyright litigation unscathed.
The settlement eliminates what could have been a messy public airing of 30-year-old studio sessions, authorship disputes, and the kind of he-said-she-said testimony that makes juries uncomfortable. For Elliott, it removes a potential distraction during what remains a successful career. For Williams, it likely means some compensation without the risk of walking away empty-handed after years of litigation.
Both cases—Williams v. Elliott (2:18-cv-05418) and Elliott v. Williams (2:21-cv-02290)—are now closed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, ending a legal saga that began in 2018 but traced back to the early 1990s hip-hop scene.
Sometimes the best trial strategy is avoiding trial altogether.
