The CAA Range lawsuit is a multi-front legal fight between Creative Artists Agency and Range Media Partners that began when CAA sued Range in Los Angeles Superior Court on September 30, 2024, accusing the younger firm of operating as an unlicensed talent agency, poaching clients, and stealing confidential data. Since then the dispute has expanded to include a Range countersuit over noncompete agreements, a confidential arbitration that ordered CAA to pay more than $42 million to four former agents, and the threatened mass action by dozens or hundreds of current and former CAA agents. As of mid-2026, no trial date has been set, and both sides say they are prepared to keep fighting.
What CAA Is Accusing Range Of
CAA’s complaint, filed as case number 24SMCP00411, calls Range “an unlicensed talent agency built on deceit” and groups the allegations into three buckets.
The first is data theft. CAA alleges that departing employees forwarded volumes of confidential material to personal email accounts and phones, including information about clients’ current and future projects, branding strategies, and business plans. A later amended complaint added claims that the Range founders used Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and burner phones to move sensitive material while avoiding detection.
The second is the core structural claim: that Range functions as a talent agency while calling itself a management company, sidestepping California’s Talent Agencies Act and Writers Guild of America rules. Licensed agencies face restrictions on owning stakes in production companies and collecting producer fees on packaged projects. Management companies do not. CAA argues Range’s setup is a “trick” designed to do the deals a licensed agency cannot.
The third is client poaching. CAA alleges the departing agents solicited CAA clients while still on CAA’s payroll and used client photos in Range’s marketing without consent to imply an affiliation with the new firm. The causes of action include contract interference, interference with economic advantage, aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty, and violations of California’s Business and Professions Code.
How the Court Has Ruled So Far
Range moved to dismiss the complaint, arguing among other things that any Talent Agencies Act dispute belonged before the California Labor Commissioner rather than a Superior Court judge, and that the Act regulates disputes between artists and agents, not fights between competing businesses.
On August 7, 2025, Judge Mark A. Young issued a mixed ruling. He dismissed several claims, including tortious interference, trade secret theft, and illegal access to confidential information, writing that “soliciting clients is not independently wrongful.” He kept alive CAA’s central allegation that Range holds an unfair advantage by skirting talent agency laws. And he rejected Range’s jurisdictional argument outright, writing that the Talent Agencies Act “does not purport to regulate the relationship between Agents and other businesses” and acknowledging that Range “may indeed be violating the Talent Agencies Act.” CAA got 20 days to amend.
On June 8, 2026, CAA filed an amended complaint that revived the theft-of-trade-secrets and unauthorized-computer-access allegations with new detail. It accused Range partner Mick Sullivan of emailing himself client “rundowns” and hundreds of pages of meeting notes while still at CAA, and of pressuring a CAA assistant to hand over lists of nearly 200 scripts sent to clients. It accused Range employee Paige Wandling of using a CAA “mole” identified as “Employee-1” to obtain hundreds of confidential documents over several weeks, allegedly in exchange for payment. The unfair competition claims that survived the demurrer stayed in the case.
Range’s Countersuit Over Noncompetes
On November 24, 2025, Range filed its own lawsuit against CAA in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging that CAA runs an “unlawful campaign” to limit Range’s growth by weaponizing illegal noncompete agreements.
Range’s specific claim is that CAA threatened to cancel the vested equity of employees who left for Range while letting agents who departed for other management firms keep their stakes. California law has long been hostile to noncompete provisions, and Range argues CAA’s are void and were enforced selectively against people considering Range. The countersuit seeks an injunction barring CAA from enforcing the noncompetes plus at least $1 million in damages for unfair competition and tortious interference. Range’s filing noted that arbitrators in earlier proceedings had already found CAA’s noncompete agreements invalid.
The $42 Million Arbitration Ruling
Running alongside the Superior Court case was a confidential arbitration between CAA and the four former agents who co-founded Range in August 2020: Jack Whigham, Dave Bugliari, Michael Cooper, and Mick Sullivan. When they left, CAA canceled tens of millions of dollars in their vested and unvested equity. The arbitration decided whether CAA had the right to do that.
In early 2026, a three-judge JAMS panel of former judges Rosalyn Chapman, William Cahill, and Luis Cardenas ruled for the former agents. The panel found CAA had breached contractual and statutory fiduciary duties by canceling the equity interests. It was sharply critical of CAA’s leadership, finding that Bryan Lourd, Kevin Huvane, and Richard Lovett, the “Big Three” who administered the equity program, were “ignorant” of their fiduciary and statutory duties regarding the disbursement of equity and the co-ownership roles of equity recipients.
The panel ordered CAA to pay $36 million in cash to the four former agents plus $6 million in legal fees, for a total above $42 million. Payment was ordered in cash rather than as reinstated equity. The panel also rejected CAA’s trade secret counterclaims.
The ruling was under a confidentiality order, but news of it leaked in early 2026. At a January hearing, CAA attorney Bo Pearl told the court, “We think it’s wildly inappropriate that somebody has leaked — and we believe it’s on the other side — the decision.” In March 2026, Range subpoenaed Bryan Freedman, the attorney who won the arbitration, to force production of the ruling, arguing it could gut CAA’s remaining claims. CAA called the subpoena an “end-run around the confidential nature of the proceedings.” The court indicated it would weigh the arbitration decision’s relevance once CAA’s appeal of the ruling is finalized.
CAA has filed a notice of appeal, and as of mid-2026 that appeal is pending. A source close to CAA told reporters a final resolution is “still years away” and the agency is “prepared to fight for as long as it takes.”
The Threatened Mass Action
The arbitration ruling opened a second front that could dwarf the first. Bryan Freedman began organizing what he described as a “mass action” on behalf of current and former CAA agents who were allegedly required to sign illegal noncompete agreements as a condition of participating in the agency’s equity programs. In a mass action, unlike a class action, each plaintiff is represented and assessed for damages individually.
Freedman estimated potential plaintiffs “anywhere between dozens to hundreds of past and present equity holders.” The action would seek to void the noncompete agreements, recover lost equity for departed agents, and let current agents keep their equity while joining competing firms. As of March 2026, no mass action had been filed, but Freedman confirmed he was building the case, drawing on the JAMS panel’s findings about the Big Three’s fiduciary failures and the invalidity of CAA’s noncompete provisions.
The Underlying Question
Beyond the individual claims, the dispute turns on a boundary line in Hollywood: what separates a licensed talent agency from a management company. Agencies operate under the Talent Agencies Act and guild agreements that generally bar them from owning significant stakes in production companies or collecting producer fees on projects they package. Management companies face no such rules.
CAA argues Range does the work of an agency while dodging the rules that govern one. Range says it is a legitimate management firm offering a different model of representation, and points out that no artist has ever filed a Talent Agencies Act complaint against it. Judge Young’s decision to keep that question in court rather than send it to the Labor Commissioner means a judge will eventually decide where the line falls, and that ruling could reshape how management companies across the industry operate.
The financial stakes for CAA extend well past the $42 million already ordered. The agency’s equity program touches every senior agent at the firm, and if the mass action materializes and applies the same reasoning about fiduciary duties and unenforceable noncompetes, CAA’s exposure could grow substantially. As of mid-2026, no trial date has been set in the Superior Court litigation, the arbitration appeal is pending, and the mass action has not been filed.