Chad Fitzgerald specializes in entertainment and business litigation as well as transactional matters for entertainment industry clients. He has represented actors, musicians, professional athletes, and production and distribution entities, as well as clients in the toy, apparel, and diamond industries, entertainment guilds, personal and business managers, and talent agents and agencies in disputes in California and federal courts as well as before the California Labor Commissioner and the guilds. Mr. Fitzgerald handles contract, profit participation, financing, distribution, copyright, and trademark disputes in the entertainment industry as well as general litigation matters involving contracts, sales, employment, partnership and franchise disputes, fraud, trade secrets, rights of privacy, and defamation. He also negotiates agreements for intellectual property rights holders, entertainment industry executives, producers, and independent filmmakers, among others.
Mr. Fitzgerald was part of a KWIKA trial team that obtained one of the Daily Journal‘s Top 10 Defense Verdicts of 2007. He has been honored as a Super Lawyer “Rising Star” in Los Angeles Magazine. Chad wrote and published, alongside KWIKA’s Larry Iser, an article in Intellectual Property Today on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s application to residual payments for independent film producers. He has also written columns for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, Moviemaker.com, and The Huffington Post on legal issues in the entertainment industry.
Prior to joining KWIKA in 2007, Chad worked in the Business and Legal Affairs department of Universal Pictures, negotiating and drafting agreements to acquire intellectual property rights for Universal and engaging writers, producers, directors, and actors to render services on Universal films. While at Universal, he also handled above- and below-the-line agreements for films in production and oversaw all of Universal’s agreements with visual and special effects companies.
Chad was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada and is a graduate of Yale (B.A. with distinction in English, 1998) and the UCLA School of Law (J.D., 2001). While at UCLA, he externed for the Honorable J. Spencer Letts (U.S. District Court, Central District of California) and volunteered for AIDS Project Los Angeles. He currently sits on the board of directors of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Santa Monica. He lives in Westlake Village with his wife and twin sons.
