Christopher A. Taravella is a Shareholder with Montgomery Little & Soran. Mr. Taravella was born and raised in Pueblo, Colorado, and is currently admitted to the Bars of Colorado and Wyoming. Since December 1983, he has been licensed to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.  

Before joining Montgomery Little & Soran, he was a judge advocate (JAG) in the United States Air Force for twenty-one years.  While on active duty, Mr. Taravella served as an Air Force prosecutor, having more than one hundred trials.  He was designated a Special Assistant United States Attorney for civil litigation as the Chief of the Constitutional Torts Branch of The Judge Advocate General’s Office in Washington, D.C.  In the Air Force Reserves, Mr. Taravella was the Staff Judge Advocate of an airlift and refueling wing at Selfridge Air National Guard Base, Michigan.  His tours of duty include Special Operations at Hurlburt Field, Florida, a tactical fighter training wing in Zaragoza, Spain, and the Pentagon in Virginia.

Mr. Taravella left active duty with the Air Force to join Chrysler Corporation in 1985, where he was the Litigation Department head under Lee Iacocca.  He has extensive experience with commercial and employment litigation, including class actions.  He was Chrysler’s Chief Patent Counsel for seven years and was responsible for all intellectual property transactional and litigation matters, including patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secrets.  As such, he was responsible for the defense of the intermittent windshield wiper patent infringement litigation filed by Robert Kearns against the auto industry and the bar code/synthetic voice/machine vision patent infringement litigation filed by Jerome Lemelson against the auto and other industries.  He was also responsible for all of Chrysler’s commercial contracts.

Mr. Taravella became the General Counsel of Chrysler Financial Corporation in 1997 and then of the merged Chrysler Financial/Mercedes-Benz Credit unit.  He held this position for nine years.  He was responsible for the legal, audit, and process management activities of the $95 billion in receivables captive finance unit.  This responsibility included sales finance licensing, corporate matters, the defense of class action, lender liability, contract, and employment litigation, the formation of a Utah Industrial Loan Corporation, securities and funding matters, securitization of receivables, and retail and wholesale auto financing.

After joining Montgomery Little & Soran, Mr. Taravella has been lead counsel in seven preliminary injunction hearings in both state and federal court and has tried several bench and jury matters to conclusion.   In April 2013, he won a preliminary injunction in a trademark matter for a Denver-based client in a San Antonio, Texas Federal District Court.

Mr. Taravella is actively involved in various community affairs and philanthropic activities.  He served on U.S. Senator Mark E. Udall’s Service Academies Merit Selection Panel (2010, 2013, 2014) and U.S. Senator Michael Bennet’s Service Academies Merit Selection Panel (2017), is a regular soup server at the St. Francis Center, 2323 Curtis Street in Denver (since 2008), and is an Executive Committee Member for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, 2111 Champa Street, also in Denver (since 2010).  He has also served as a guest faculty member for the Law and Management Departments at the U. S. Air Force Academy (since 2006), and J.J. Strossmayer University Faculty of Law, Osijek, Croatia (March 2013).  Mr. Taravella spoke at the Center for International Studies Employment and Business Immigration Conference in Salzburg, Austria (June 2011).  He has also represented several veterans (and their widows) in a pro bono capacity, including matters before the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans’ Claims, the Veterans’ Administration, and the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records.     

Mr. Taravella has also served as a director of: RouteOne LLC, a credit application aggregation joint venture of GMAC, Ford Motor Credit, Toyota Financial Services, and DaimlerChrysler Financial Services Americas; the YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit; the Bloomfield Hills, Michigan Baseball League; Oxlo Systems, Inc., a provider of automotive retail integration networks; the American Financial Services Association; and the Governing Committee of the Conference on Consumer Finance Law.  He is also an instrument-rated, commercial airplane pilot: multi-engine, land and a certified open water SCUBA diver.      

1976    J.D.
University of Colorado School of Law
with honors

1973    B.S.
United States Air Force Academy
Engineering Mechanics

1996    Advanced Management Program: International Senior Management Program
Harvard Business School

Presenter, “So you Think you Know how to do an Offer of Settlement under WRCP 68? Not so Fast,” Wyoming State Bar Annual Meeting and Judicial Conference (September 2016) 

Faculty Member, Law and Management Departments at the U. S. Air Force Academy (Since 2006)

Faculty Member, J.J. Strossmayer University Faculty of Law, Osijek, Croatia (March 2013)

Presenter, Center for International Studies Employment and Business Immigration Conference in Salzburg, Austria (June 2011)

Co-Author, “An Annotated Arbitration Clause,” Conference on Consumer Finance Law, Automotive Sales Finance Organizations (2002)

Commercial Litigation

Patents

Trademarks

Copyrights

Corporate Law

Employment Law

Aviation Law, specializing in representing aircraft pilots in FAA enforcement actions

Aviation

Automotive

Banks, Credit Unions, and Financial Service Companies

Motor Vehicle Captive Finance Companies