Douglas J. Wood

CSN Senior Advisor on Brand, Advertising and Sponsors

From CSN’s point of view this year’s 2024 National Child Safety Award is being presented to Douglas because of the years of volunteer service constant ability to connect us with high level decision makers for needed resources and arranging for pro bono legal to be provided during the past 20 years.

Douglas J. Wood has practiced law for over 45 years.   In 2004, he and most of his colleagues from Hall Dickler, an entertainment boutique he managed, joined Reed Smith and founded the firm’s Entertainment and Media Law practice group, which today is among the leading entertainment and media law practices in the world. 

In 2024, he founded his own solo practice.  He is among the leading global specialists in advertising law in Chambers, the Legal 500, The Best Lawyers in America, and Super Lawyers and is a member of the Legal 500 Advertising Law Hall of Fame.

He received his BA from the University of Rhode Island, Juris Doctor from the Franklin Pierce Law Center, Master of Laws in Trade Regulation from New York University School of Law, and an Honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of New Hampshire.  Doug has been an adjunct professor of advertising law at the UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law and the University College Cork in Ireland.  He was on the Board of Trustees of the Franklin Pierce Law Center for over 20 years and served as its Chair for 15 years, leading it through its merger with the University of New Hampshire.  He remains on the Dean’s Council.

He served as General Counsel to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) for over twenty years and remains counsel to the ANA’s Board of Directors.  He is a Management Trustee on the Screen Actors Guild Pension Plan.  For more than a decade, he was the advertising industry’s Chief Negotiator for the collective bargaining agreements with SAG-AFTRA, the largest union agreements in the entertainment industry. 

Doug is the founder and emeritus member of the Global Advertising Lawyers Alliance (GALA), an international network composed of independent law firms that have expertise in advertising and marketing law with members from over 80 countries. 

Doug has considerable experience in e-tailing, NFTs, programmatic buying, and more. His experience includes intellectual property issues that arise in connection with marketing brands, including false and deceptive advertising, copyright and trademark licensing and infringement, and the growing global concerns relating to privacy and data security under U.S. law and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.  He is also an inventor and holds a patent for online trademark maintenance.

Doug is the author of Please Be AdVised – The Legal Reference Guide for the Advertising Executive (7^th edition), considered, as Bob Liodice, CEO of the Association of National Advertisers said, the legal bible for the industry. 

He is also a novelist with nine other books: 101 Things I Want to Say…the Collection (2014), a book on fatherly advice; Presidential Intentions (2014), Presidential Declarations (2015), and Presidential Conclusions (2017), an award-winning political thriller trilogy about the first female President of the United States, Asshole Attorney: Musings, Memories and Missteps in a 40 Year Career (2018), winner of the 2019 Independent Press Award for Best Humour and Wit, Dark Data: Control, Alt, Delete (2020), a thriller about terrorism’s use of social media and winner of the 2020 Independent Press Award for Best Political Thriller, Dragon on the Far Side of the Moon (2021), a thriller pitting the United States and China against one another in colonizing the moon, Blood on the Bayou (2022), an award-winning novel set in New Orleans that pits a serial killer against an FBI profiler, and The Shakespeare Killer (2023), a sequel to Blood on the Bayou that follows his FBI profiler on a global search for a serial killer murdering criminal defense attorneys.  His 2024 releasees will include his next novel, Deadly Bytes, and Dawn to Dusk: How to Build a Multimillion Dollar Law Practice and then Give it Away.  All of his novels and many blogs can at www.douglasjwood.com. 

Doug lives in North Carolina with Carol Ann, his wife of fifty years, and is the father of three wonderful children and their spouses and five fantastic grandchildren.  In his spare time, he works on improving his golf game, a never-ending battle.

Doug is an absolute treasure to CSN as we have been sponsored by advertisers for nearly 35 years which allows us to carry a zero overhead with an all-volunteer staff.