Develop Your Business Speaker: NANPA Summit 2025
www.lisacalvarez.com
Lisa C. Alvarez is a California-licensed lawyer and nature photographer based near Sacramento. Lisa counsels and educates photographers on how to proactively prepare for and protect their creative work and businesses against the variable landscape of generative AI and other technologies.
Presently, Lisa serves as Secretary on the National Board of Directors for the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), a trade organization for photographers. She’s also a member of the Copyright Society, the Intellectual Property Section of the California Lawyers Association and its Copyright Interest Group, and the Alameda County Bar Association.
Lisa began her legal career over thirty years ago as an appellate attorney for the California Attorney General’s Office. Then, she entered private practice, first as a civil and criminal litigator and, later, as an elder law, trust, and estate planning practitioner.
In 2006, she paused her legal career to move to Madrid, where she took photography lessons from a local professional. Upon returning to California, she worked as an event photographer for the local school foundation and a small magazine before discovering her passion for nature photography.
While learning how to protect her own creative work, Lisa noticed other photographers struggling to enforce their copyrights. Drawing on her legal expertise, she began teaching photography groups about image rights and then opened her current law practice.
When not keeping up with the latest legal trends or photographing birds in urban spaces, you can find Lisa spending time with her family, walking their dog Astro, or knitting while binge-watching the latest cable series.
CopyWronged © – Case Stories of Wildly Successful Infringement Settlements
Tuesday, May 13 / 3:00pm – 4:00pm / Verbena
NOTE: This Session is part of the day-long seminar: “Develop Your Business” and requires that this Seminar is added to your Summit Registration or purchased seperately. For more information or questions about adding this Seminar, please contact summit@nanpa.org.
We’ve all heard about registering photos to protect against copyright infringement, but most of us haven’t bothered to do it. Since copyright ownership is automatic, why we should even bother?
In this session, we’ll answer that question. We’ll bring to life the legal principles involved by weaving in compelling case studies of real-life infringements successfully pursued by NANPA members and others. These cases resulted in lucrative settlements simply because the images were registered in advance.
Today, more than ever, it pays to protect the intellectual property of the photos we create. And it’s never been easier. We hope this session will tempt you to reconsider the value of copyright registration and take a few minutes to register select images.
At any time, an image can end up in the wrong place at the right time, or even go viral and get scooped up by a company that should have known better than to use it without a license. But they do it because they don’t expect photographers to do anything about it.
We’ll show you what happens when photographers take time to protect their work and how those companies end up paying the consequences. And the photographers? They end up with significant rewards – sometimes as tangible as a new truck!
Legal Clinic LIVE! w/ Thomas Maddrey & Lisa C. Alvarez
Tuesday, May 13 / 4:00pm – 4:45pm / Verbena
NOTE: This Session is part of the day-long seminar: “Develop Your Business” and requires that this Seminar is added to your Summit Registration or purchased seperately. For more information or questions about adding this Seminar, please contact summit@nanpa.org.
Each Tuesday, Thomas Maddrey meets with ASMP & NANPA Members and discusses all manner of Legal & Business questions one-on-one! And during the Develop Your Business program, Thomas will be joined by Nature Photographer, Attorney, and ASMP Board Member Lisa C. Alvarez to assist in answering all your questions!
Now is your chance to have your questions answered live in this first-ever rapid-fire business presentation. You won’t want to miss this one!