Actors worked for nearly a year without a contract during a fractious negotiation that ended after Mr. Counter turned over leadership of the alliance to his protégée, Carol Lombardini.  Yet Mr. Counter was best known inside Hollywood for having corralled the alliance’s diverse and often contentious film and television companies into a bargaining unit that was sufficiently disciplined to strike deal after deal with only a handful of breakdowns over nearly three decades.  “I never knew him to break his word,” said Gilbert Cates, the secretary-treasurer of the Directors Guild, who had squared off with Mr. Counter in a number of contract talks. “It was really important, because he was giving his word for a lot of people who weren’t necessarily in unison.”  Before Mr. Counter joined the newly formed alliance in 1982, companies like 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures had drifted away from an earlier bargaining group to conduct negotiations on their own.  James Nicholas Counter was born in Phoenix on March 21, 1940, and grew up in Colorado, where his father, a steel-mill hand, worked his way into management.  After graduating from the University of Colorado and receiving a law degree from Stanford, he practiced law in Los Angeles and represented the alliance’s predecessor.  Mr. Counter insisted that the film and television companies keep a united front, not so much to prevail over the unions as to avoid the chaos that had plagued earlier negotiations. He often said that labor talks should not have winners and losers. “Negotiations just end with your ability to make a deal,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1987.  He is survived by his wife, Jackie; a son, Nicholas; a daughter, Samantha Kurtzman-Counter; and a grandson.  Mr. Counter was particularly proud of his service as a trustee of 14 union health and pension funds, and of the Motion Picture and Television Fund, an industry-oriented philanthropy. The well-being of those funds, which have been strained by rising costs and the prolonged economic downturn, are likely to be an issue in a next round of negotiations by the alliance.  A version of this article appears in print on November 9, 2009, on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: J. Nicholas Counter III, 69, Labor Lawyer. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Counter was a lawyer who changed the face of labor relations in Hollywood during his long tenure as chief negotiator for hundreds of film and television companies.