Christopher Tayback

Practice Areas

Christopher Tayback enjoys a reputation as a lawyer’s lawyer – a fiercely accomplished litigator who has won cases of all varieties in venues of all kinds. An esteemed and trusted leader within the firm, he serves as Co-Managing Partner of Quinn Emanuel’s Los Angeles office.

Mr. Tayback’s experience as a trial lawyer covers a wide range of practice areas and subjects, including antitrust, bankruptcy, consumer class actions, criminal defense, defamation, employment matters, environmental cases, fraud, patent and intellectual property litigation, and qui tam, to name just a selection. He has won record-setting patent verdicts, criminal cases, and even a history-making contract case for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (of which his father was a member.)

Before joining Quinn Emanuel in 1997, Mr. Tayback spent eight years as a prosecutor – first as a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles County and later as an Assistant United States Attorney, also in Los Angeles. He received numerous awards from the various federal, state and local law enforcement agencies with which he worked, and the Los Angeles Times once took note of his bravura “courtroom performer” style in its coverage of a high-profile murder case he prosecuted.

Today, he is a nationally recognized litigator and a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. In his four-decade career, Mr. Tayback has tried or arbitrated more than 100 cases – civil and criminal – in jurisdictions across the country.

In recent years, Mr. Tayback has obtained a $128 million patent infringement verdict at trial, a $120 million jury verdict in a property dispute, and a jury finding of zero damages in defense of a $200 million+ consumer class action.

For over two decades, Mr. Tayback has served as a visiting trial instructor at Harvard Law School. He is listed in Best Lawyers in America and is a member of the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum, the Association of Business Trial Lawyers, and is routinely recognized as one of Southern California's "Super Lawyers." He has also been ranked for commercial litigation by Chambers USA, which stated, “Christopher is a terrific lawyer … aggressive in court in a professional way.”

A former child actor, Tayback is the son of a revered television and movie actor, the late Vic Tayback (who played Mel on the sitcom “Alice” in the 1970s and ‘80s.)