Lifestyle

Meet the lawyer who defends the world’s most beautiful women

Attorney Tom Mullaney has found a burgeoning, and many male colleagues would say enviable, niche in his legal practice — representing ​some of the world’s most​ ​beautiful women ​in legal disputes.

The de facto model advocate allows that his work is more alluring than your run-of-the-mill commercial case, but he insists it’s also an uphill battle representing young and often foreign-born women against heavyweight modeling agencies and advertising firms.

“The knee jerk reaction is why do these models need any help? There’s a tendency to think everyone has a glamorous job in this jet-set industry,” he told The Post.

“Unfortunately there’s plenty of opportunity to take advantage of people who are not all that sophisticated in financial affairs,” Mullaney said.

The David vs. Goliath litigator has represented a dozen industry clients in the past eight years.

“I counsel models on whether contracts they have are good or bad, or can be improved or negotiated,” he said.

He stumbled into the specialty practice, befriending a male model named Marko Zelenovic in his local coffee shop.

Through Zelenovic, Mullaney met the owners of a now-defunct agency called Vision New York. He fended off lawsuits against the bankrupt business by collecting debts and distributing cash to unpaid models.

Model Irina Krupnik was one of Mullaney’s clients.Getty Images

Word-of-mouth connected the married Manhattan dad to other catwalkers — he took on NBC Universal in 2010 on behalf of radiant Russian Irina Krupnik, whose image was used without her permission in a scene from the film “Couples Retreat.”

Mullaney lost the $10 million case.

But last year he successfully beat back a class action suit on behalf of modeling agency Red.

He’s currently battling MC2 for leggy European Marina Asenova, who claimed her former employers sold her image to Coty Cosmetics without paying her a dime.

Asenova, writing from a photo shoot in Europe, told The Post she felt lucky to have found Mullaney.

“He is an impeccable professional with a great sense of humor and a good heart,” the 5-foot-9 brunette stunner gushed.

Former Manhattan federal judge Richard Holwell worked with Mullaney 20 years ago at the international white-shoe law firm White and Case.

“He comes across as a very collected, friendly individual, but in fact he’s a tenacious bulldog which is what you need in some of these cases,” Howell said.