Who Is Taylor Swift’s New Top Lawyer?

With Taylor Swift hiring one of her longtime lawyers as the new general counsel for her 13 Management, Billboard dug into the many cases he’s handled for the superstar – including a bizarre trademark battle with an “Evermore” theme park and Taylor’s high-profile assault accusations against a radio DJ.

As reported Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal, Swift’s company is set to hire Douglas Baldridge, a veteran litigator at the major Washington, D.C.-based law firm law firm Venable, as the new top attorney for her company in the fall. He’s replacing Jay Schaudies, who the Journal says is retiring.

Though he’s technically a new hire at 13 Management, Baldridge and Swift are hardly strangers. From his position as outside counsel at Venable, Baldridge has repped Swift and her company for years in a number of major lawsuits.

His work for the star first made headlines in 2017, when he represented her in a high-profile battle with a Denver radio DJ named David Mueller, who Swift claimed had groped her at photoshoot. Mueller sued Swift for defamation, claiming her accusations were false and had cost him his job. Taylor quickly countersued, accusing Mueller of civil assault and battery over the incident.

At a jury trial in August 2017, Baldridge was direct with jurors in his closing statement: “The guy did it. Don’t be fooled. Don’t be snookered.” After just four hours of deliberations, the jury agreed – rejecting Mueller’s allegations and holding him liable for assault and battery. After the verdict was read, Taylor blinked back tears and mouthed “thank you” to Baldridge and her other attorneys.

His work for Swift dates back even further, though. In 2014, Baldridge and other Venable lawyers defended the star in a lawsuit filed against her by a small apparel company called Lucky 13, which accused Swift of infringing its trademarks by selling T-shirts featuring that same phrase. After an extended battle over whether the star would be forced to sit for a deposition, the case ended in a settlement the next year.

One of Baldridge’s biggest recent wins for Taylor came in 2021, when a Utah fantasy theme park called Evermore sued her for trademark infringement, claiming her smash-hit acoustic album was threatening to “crowd out” its own brand name.

But Swift’s lawyers quickly flipped the script. They filed a countersuit claiming it was the theme park that was in the wrong, for allegedly neglecting to pay royalties for playing Taylor’s songs for their customers – not just over loud speakers, but with live performances by the theme park’s character performers. They argued the park had even sought out retroactive licenses to cover up its wrongdoing.

“Defendants are making a thinly-veiled attempt to fabricate a record to justify and retroactively authorize their intentional infringement that has gone unabated since Evermore Park opened in 2018,” Baldridge wrote in that complaint. “However, a cover-up attempt now does not and cannot erase years of willful and knowing infringement.”

A month later, the park dropped its case with no money changing hands.

Baldridge also represented Swift in the epic copyright case over the lyrics to “Shake It Off,” but as part of a larger defense that also heavily featured veteran music copyright litigator Peter Anderson of the firm Davis Wright Tremaine. That case ended in a settlement in December.

As he gears up to step into the general counsel role, Baldridge is currently defending the star from another copyright lawsuit, this one filed over a companion book for her album Lover. In that case, a woman named Teresa La Dart claims Taylor stole key elements of the book’s design from her own self-published book of poetry.

In a February response to those allegations, Baldridge didn’t hold back – arguing that the case should be dismissed immediately because it failed in every way possible: “This is a lawsuit that never should have been filed, as it is legally and factually baseless.”

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