Working for a sports league through HLS’s Sports Law Clinic

By Benjamin Roth, J.D. ’19

Benjamin Roth, J.D. ’19

Over J-term, I worked at the NFL headquarters in New York for their legal department. For me it was a dream come true to work at a place that fused together my two passions: legal analysis and NFL football.

The first thing that struck me when I arrived was just how professional and polished everyone and everything in the office was. My name was on my cubicle, I had a standing desk with a dual screen setup, and I immediately met with my attorney supervisor.

She assigned me two principle projects. The first was to redo the law enforcement training module on identifying authentic NFL merchandise. The main point of the assignment was to dress up the power point presentation and to update it, and it was a really great way for me to learn about the security features that the NFL employs to protect its fans and partners, the common ways in which counterfeiters fail to emulate authentic merchandise, and the tricks they utilize to fool unwitting consumers into purchasing the bootleg products.

My second project was to research the current law in China regarding the copyrightable status of a live sports broadcast. This project was especially interesting because it was an entirely different kind of research from what I was taught in law school. There were no cases in Westlaw, so I needed to go to the web and be creative. I had to find English translations of cases and articles and I reached out to a speaker at a symposium on the topic. After focusing on publicity rights in class during the semester, it was fascinating to explore the different system in China. This was a memo unlike any I had written over the summer or in school as it wasn’t predictive or persuasive, and so it felt like I was learning an entirely new skill set.

Whereas those initial projects were somewhat out of the box, legal research and writing wise, my last two projects were much more conventional, and one of them was almost a direct review of Prof. Peter Carfagna’s Sports Law class I took this past semester. I was asked by my supervisor to assist a different member of the legal team by writing two separate memos about the laws regarding trademark and publicity rights in video games throughout the United States. It was a very typical law school memo, with a ton of research on Westlaw and the like. It was really interesting to deal with the issue of publicity rights, given that we had done an entire class on it, and it was intellectually satisfying to see the legal difference between the rights of publicity and a trademark in the law. It was especially interesting to me to be able to deal with a national organization like the NFL, and really get to focus on which circuit might be best for which claim.

In between researching and writing the memos I was assigned, I had a chance to learn from a lot of people in different departments. I met some wonderful people and forged new connections. I also learned a lot about being in-house counsel to a big company, and I got to see firsthand what working for a sports league entailed.