Cadden & Fuller LLP

Focus and practice areas

The firm works in civil and commercial disputes, with a home base in Irvine, California. Its litigation covers business matters, real estate, investment and securities, employment defense, and intellectual property. The transactional practice runs alongside and handles business, corporate, and real estate deals. That mix lets one office take a client through a contract first and then through the fight if the contract breaks down later.

Business litigation here reaches breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, fraud, unfair competition, and creditor remedies. The same group covers partnership and shareholder disputes. These are the cases that pull apart who owed what to whom inside a company, and they often turn on internal records more than on public events. As a reviewer, I read that spread as a practice built around money and business ownership.

Two further areas complete the litigation picture. The firm defends employers in employment matters, the position that answers a worker's claim. It also handles intellectual property disputes, where the argument is over rights to a name, a design, or protected work. Both connect back to the business clients the firm serves across its other practice areas.

How the team is built

Six attorneys carry the firm's name across its work: Thomas H. Cadden, H. Daniel Fuller, William D. Chapman, S. Judy Hirahara, Cecilia A. Perkins, and John B. Taylor. The two names on the door, Cadden and Fuller, front a group of six who share a single attorneys page.

One detail on the home page ties the practice together. Several of its lawyers have backgrounds in finance and accounting, and the firm applies that training to financial disputes. In my opinion, that is worth knowing when a case turns on ledgers, valuations, or the flow of money between partners. A firm that reads a balance sheet in-house can move faster on the kind of claim that lives in the numbers.

A group of this size usually gives one lead lawyer to a matter and pulls in colleagues when the work calls for it. That keeps a client with a named contact while still drawing on the wider bench. The firm presents all six on one shared page, which reads as a single team.

Where real estate disputes land

Property work is a clear second pillar. The firm handles breach of lease disputes, purchase and sale litigation, and zoning disputes. It also takes landlord-tenant and commercial lease conflicts, Americans with Disabilities Act claims, and Proposition 65 litigation. That range covers both the owner's side and the tenant's side of a commercial building.

Some of these matters carry their own procedure. Zoning disputes often begin at a city planning commission and can move to a council hearing or a writ petition in Superior Court. Proposition 65 claims turn on California's warning rules for chemical exposure, and they generally open with a notice of violation before any filing. Americans with Disabilities Act claims in a commercial setting usually concern access to a building or a storefront. Each of these appears on the firm's real estate list.

Insurance and financial disputes

Coverage fights are a smaller but distinct part of the practice. The firm handles bad faith claims and cases where an insurer refuses to defend or fails to indemnify. These matters test the promise inside a policy, and they often hinge on the wording of coverage and the timeline of the claim. A refusal to defend, in particular, can decide who pays for a lawsuit before the underlying case is even resolved.

Investment and securities litigation belongs in the same financial group. That work covers disputes over how money was raised, managed, or reported. The finance and accounting background the firm names fits these cases, since both insurance and securities claims tend to rest on documents and figures.

The transactional side

Away from the courtroom, the firm drafts and negotiates deals. Its transactional practice covers business and corporate transactions, real estate transactions, and labor transactions. A client who forms an entity or signs a commercial lease can use the same firm that would later argue a dispute over that same paperwork.

Corporate transactional work usually means entity formation, ownership agreements, and the terms that set how partners join and leave. Real estate transactions cover purchase, sale, and lease documents. The firm names labor transactions as well, which reaches into the employment side of its practice and the contracts that govern a workforce.

Pairing deal work with litigation has a practical use for a business client. The lawyers who wrote an agreement already know its terms if that agreement later goes to court. In my opinion, that continuity is one of the more useful things a firm of this shape can offer.

What the record shows

The firm states more than 25 years of practice. It works with business clients of varying sizes across Orange County and the wider Southern California area. The site does not name a founding year, so that 25-year figure is the clearest marker of how long the group has run.

Across litigation and transactions, the firm keeps a business-focused practice with a real estate and financial core. The firm runs this whole practice from a single Irvine office that serves Orange County and Southern California.