It would seem Christine Taylor was predestined to a career in the outdoor hospitality industry.

After all, she spent her formative years from ages 9 to 14 living on a campground in upstate New York near Cooperstown, owned and operated by her parents as part of the Yogi Bear Jellystone Park franchise. She even worked as its mascot, donning the Yogi costume in the blistering summer sun for which she was paid in rolls of quarters — payment, which she admits, she pumped directly back into the campground’s arcade.

Yet, her background notwithstanding, Christine initially had other plans. An accomplished opera singer — with an undergraduate and master’s degree in Voice Performance and honors bestowed upon her from the Metropolitan Opera National Council — her sights, instead, were set on a career as a performer, not an attorney.

“I thought everything was great and I came home to visit my mom, and she said that I sounded weird. I was like, ‘Oh, what does that mean?’” recalled Christine, now a partner in Goldberg Segalla’s Retail and Hospitality and Employment and Labor practice groups.

Her mother’s comment led to a series of visits with specialist after specialist, and eventually Christine was diagnosed with a vocal cord condition that ultimately would derail her fledgling singing career. Suddenly, she was faced with having to make a decision about her future.

“I compare it to a football player who blows out their knee,” she said. “You don’t want to base your income on an unreliable body part. So, while I was figuring out the next move, I was like, ‘Hey, law school doesn’t care what your previous degrees were in. You just have to have a good GPA.’ I was like that young artist who was desperate and signed all these contracts I didn’t understand.”

Christine decided to attend UCLA law school, where she focused on entertainment law and a career representing musicians and, after receiving her J.D., she went to work as an attorney in the entertainment industry. But the east coast was calling, and eventually Christine moved back to New York. Now married at this point, she went to work for a small general practice firm in Albany where, unexpectedly, her career would change forever.

“There’s a lot of associations for campground owners and one of them is called Campground Owners of New York,” she said. “The attorney the association was using at the time was retiring and they said, ‘Oh, Chrissy’s an attorney now. Will you come speak at this conference?’ So I went and spoke and, frankly, it was so easy because I could talk about growing up in the industry. It went really well. So then other associations asked me to do other events and then I began writing for publications. It was at this time I had this realization that when attorneys were advertising themselves as hospitality attorneys, they weren’t really targeting campgrounds. They meant more like hotels and marinas and golf courses. People didn’t really know about the outdoor hospitality side, so there was this niche and I had this background and people knew me.”

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, Christine is nationally known for her expertise in the outdoor hospitality industry. She specializes in representing self-insured and insured investors, owners and operators of campgrounds, RV parks, and glamping facilities in all areas of business law, including both transactional and litigation matters. She also serves as legal counsel for multiple outdoor hospitality associations.

A highly regarded thought leader on matters of critical importance to outdoor hospitality operators, Christine’s writing appears regularly in publications such as Woodall’s Campground Magazine and Glamping Business Americas magazine. She often appears too as a featured speaker at industry events nationwide including the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds Outdoor Hospitality Conferences, The Glamping Show Americas, Kampgrounds of America Expos, and tradeshows and conferences throughout the northeast and mid-Atlantic.

Christine is also a part owner of a campground in upstate New York, franchised as a KOA.

“It’s almost like every turn and change in my life led me right to this point. It’s just kind of crazy. If you asked me even 15 years ago if I would be an attorney doing outdoor hospitality, I’d be like, ‘what are you talking about?’ But I’ve never felt more perfectly suited for a type of law. It really works for me,” Christine said, adding that as a co-owner of a campground herself, she understands on a very personal level the unique needs of her clients — a perspective that is especially important since the sort of challenges and risks faced daily by the owners and operators of campgrounds, RV and glamping properties are atypical from traditional retail businesses.

“We’ve had a massive transition, which has really accelerated since 2020,” said Christine. “When I was a kid, most campgrounds were mom-and-pop. That’s not the case anymore. More people own multiple properties. There are people who have created brands with like 15-plus campgrounds. It’s not the same mom-and-pop model and what that did was kind of dragged our industry into the spotlight. There was a whole host of things being done incorrectly, from employment law to operations.

“Nobody was paying attention before,” she added. “But when these bigger players came in, suddenly we were getting smacked with all these lawsuits and having to finally do things correctly that people weren’t prepared for. We are still in a transitional phase specifically in this industry because they’ve been doing things wrong for so long.”

One area that needs quick improvement, she said, is in the sphere of employment law.

“We’ve long had an issue with how employees were classified,” said Christine. “They were often called independent contractors, and they’re not. There were also discrepancies in how employees were paid. My parents used to joke that ‘it’s not child labor if it’s your own child.’ But it is child labor, and if you’re going to employ people under 18, then you have standards you have to fit. The other weird niche in outdoor hospitality is what was always called ‘the work camper.’ For instance, I’d give you a campsite and you worked for me. It was a kind-of-a-bartering thing. No one was reporting that as income, and they weren’t being run through workers comp. It was just a whole headache, and technically nothing about it was legal. So, things like educating people that they actually have to pay workers and pay them appropriately, and that workers comp is actually a benefit to them and not a detriment — the employment piece is a piece that needs to be addressed.”

Operationally, Christine said, the industry is still transitioning in their approach to managing legal issues.

“I’ve been trying to push people to be on the offense. Be proactive. If you have some kind of inherently dangerous activity on a campground, then we probably want a waiver or general release about it. If we have long-term guests that stay the whole camping season, then we probably want really clear paperwork; state statutes that apply so if we ran into issues with a guest, we’re able to remove them. Operationally, having paperwork and being transparent makes it better both for guest and operator.”

Still, Christine notes that because every campground and every RV park is unique, it’s critical to be able to understand and meet each client “where they’re at. ”

“A lot of attorneys can draft a waiver and draft a contract. I think what makes me different is I can put things in a way that makes sense to a business operator,” she said. “My background, coupled with my experience as both an operator and an attorney, brings something different to the table. I can talk to clients in their language. I can empathize with what it’s like to have to remove a guest from a property, or deal with some kind of crazy damage or other strange things, because I’ve been there.”

By joining Goldberg Segalla, Christine said she believes her ability to deliver high quality service to clients has been significantly enhanced.

“Having a national reach is really important, but coupled with that, I wanted my mom-and-pop clients to feel like they are treated the same as my clients who own hundreds of properties,” she said. “At Goldberg Segalla, we do a really good job of making all clients feel important. So even with our size and our national reach and our capabilities, I think it was really important to land in a place where the clients who were there for me in the beginning feel as special as the clients who are these big, massive companies.”

At the end of the day, said Christine, it all comes down to helping people.

“I’m really a people person and I think that’s how I found myself in this niche. The people that I’d grown up with, and the campground operators that I’d see at all these conventions, I realized that they were a group of people that were kind of underserved. Hospitality is about people and what motivates me is a desire to always be better, and to help other people be better. That’s what keeps me going.”

Today, Christine uses her powerful voice to speak up on behalf of campground owners and operators everywhere, advocating for them not merely as clients but as members of an extended family sitting around the campfire where the conversation centers around goals and how they can be achieved.