Matt serves as Chair of Foster Pepper’s Media, Entertainment and Games Group, and as outside general counsel to technology and entertainment companies up and down the West Coast.
Digital Media & Entertainment
Having served as a film producer, entertainment executive and business consultant prior to practicing law, Matt brings extensive industry experience and knowledge to Foster Pepper's Arts and Entertainment Group. As the former CEO of an online proprietary television network viewed in 44 countries, he understands the unique pressures facing high-level executives and anticipates and helps clients avoid legal entertainment, licensing, and intellectual property issues.
Among his many clients, Matt represents a 2012 Academy Award-nominated production company and motion picture, one of the World’s top YouTube sensations (having received over 150,000,000 hits in 2011), several nationally-renowned authors, and one of America’s leading Connect TV development companies. Matt has drafted and negotiated artist agreements, producer and director agreements, literary agreements, crew agreements, agency agreements, SAG and AFTRA agreements, music license agreements, distribution agreements, and related technology and entertainment contracts.
Business and Technology
Matt serves as outside general counsel to a myriad of companies, drafting and negotiating everything from term sheets to distribution agreements, from manufacturing contracts to intellectual property licenses. Matt understands and appreciates that in today’s sensitive economic climate, it is more important than ever that attorneys not only provide outstanding legal work product, but also facilitate opportunities for their clients. Matt works diligently to make strategic introductions for clients that produce positive results for all involved.
Matt’s business experience has taught him that the most important part of being a lawyer is intimately understanding his client’s goals and using appropriate strategies, based on each transaction’s unique circumstances, to achieve those goals. Among many agreements, Matt has recently drafted and negotiated a $25,000,000 series of worldwide life science distribution agreements, a private placement memorandum for a $4,000,000 initial private offering, an intellectual property strategy for a company with over 3,000 pieces of unique IP, and an operating agreement and licensing contract for an IP-based company valued at over $10,000,000.
Litigation
Matt has represented clients in alternative dispute resolution and litigation matters up and down the West Coast. Most recently, Matt argued and won a case dispositive motion in an $85,000,000 dispute based in Long Beach, California. Prior to his work on that case, Matt served as part of a trial team that successfully negotiated a victory for a client in a $20,000,000 trade secret case, and helped a client recover over 90% of his money from what was labeled by the NFA as a multi-million dollar “national Ponzi scheme.” Matt has experience arguing motions in both state and federal court, and drafting motions for the California Courts of Appeal and California Supreme Court.