Blanca Young

Complex Civil Litigation, Intellectual Property, Entertainment & White Collar

San Francisco

Blanca F. Young is a Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP partner who practices complex civil litigation involving intellectual property issues, the entertainment industry and white-collar matters. She specializes in copyright and patent disputes, False Claims Act cases and investigations.

Among her clients are The Walt Disney Company, Netflix Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

She joined the firm in 2003 after graduating from UCLA School of Law and Yale University and clerking for U.S. District Judge William B. Shubb of Sacramento.

"I played soccer in high school and our coach was a lawyer, Steven Freeburg. He was a great guy who gave me a job in his law firm so I could afford the fees to play club soccer," Young said.

"He let me carry his bags to trials, and I found it very interesting." Young took a constitutional law class in college and was hooked. "I saw you have to be analytical, and synthesize facts and tell stories, and I like to do those things," she said.

The clerkship with Shubb, now a senior judge, was inspiring. "It was my inside look at how a courtroom operates," Young said. "I saw a patent trial with John Keker and Daralyn Durie. Getting to see high-powered lawyers like that in action was fantastic."

Currently, Young co-led an MTO team representing Walt Disney Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount Pictures in a lawsuit alleging the studios are liable for copyright infringement committed by a third-party visual-effects vendor, Digital Domain, for its use of MOVA, a facial motion capture software developed by the plaintiff. Rearden LLC v. The Walt Disney Company et al., 4:17-cv-04006 (N.D. Cal., filed July 17, 2017).

The studios hired Digital Domain to perform facial motion capture services for some of the biggest films of the last decade, including Beauty and the Beast, Guardians of the Galaxy and Deadpool. Reardon sought a share of profits. At trial in December 2023, Young cross-examined Rearden's CEO and others.

"Their CEO tells a good story, but I drew out some credibility issues and showed that he exaggerated the truth," she said. "We had emails saying the technology was worthless, and that undercut his money claims." The jury awarded Rearden $600,000 -- less than 1 percent of the $38 million in profits it had asked.

Young co-led an MTO team that settled on favorable terms a $1 billion copyright infringement claim by a plaintiff who contended its unpublished script was copied by Netflix and the creators of the hit streaming series "Stranger Things." Irish Rover Entertainment LLC v. Sims et al., 2:20-cv-06293 (C.D. Cal., filed July 15, 2020).

After the court denied Netflix' summary judgment motion, Netflix brought on MTO to try the case and its trial preparations led to the settlement.

"They saw our trial team and saw we were serious," Young said. "Our client was happy with the result."

-- John Roemer