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Sports & Entertainment
The Dow Lohnes Sports and Entertainment Law Practice provides professional athletes, entertainers, corporate clients, educational institutions and others in the sports and entertainment industries with a full complement of legal services, including the negotiation of a myriad variety of contracts and endorsement arrangements and the preparation of trusts and estate planning documents, as well as the protection of trademarks, rights of publicity and other intellectual property. Dow Lohnes is also expert in labor, tax, real estate and higher education matters. Current clients of the practice include athletes, coaches, teams and owners in the National Football League, National Basketball Association, United States Basketball League and Major League Baseball as well as entertainers and nonprofit institutions involved in radio and television productions and museum exhibitions. In addition, Dow Lohnes serves as legal counsel to Sprint Nextel with respect to its title sponsorship of the NASCAR NEXTEL auto racing series, its NFL sponsorship and other sports marketing agreements.
The Dow Lohnes Sports and Entertainment Practice evolved as a natural adjunct to the general legal services that Dow Lohnes has been providing to high net worth individual clients and to corporate clients since 1918.
Endorsement, Licensing, Charitable & Other Off-the-Field Opportunities
Dow Lohnes prides itself on providing assistance to its sports and entertainment clients at every stage of structuring and executing business and charitable endeavors throughout their professional and post-professional careers – from interviewing and selecting marketing representatives to developing rewarding endorsement and licensing opportunities.
Endorsement, licensing, charitable, and business opportunities generally take a variety of forms – from standard shoe and apparel sponsorship to technology endorsements and affiliations with nationally known charitable organizations. As a prominent Washington, D.C. law firm, with a nationally renowned law practice, we are also uniquely situated to facilitate opportunities for our clients “off the field.” In addition, our long history representing media clients has enabled us to facilitate potential television or other media opportunities.
Wealth Preservation Planning
A core element of the Dow Lohnes Sports and Entertainment Practice is the provision of wealth preservation planning services for our sports and entertainment clients and their families. Our wealth preservation lawyers prepare wills, charitable trusts, trusts for minors, private foundation documents and other documents designed to assist in wealth preservation and inter-generational wealth transfer for our clients. Personal tax planning services, including the transfer of wealth through gift and estate planning, asset protection and the restructuring of business interests, are provided to our clients and successive generations of their families. Our lawyers assist our sports and entertainment clients with the creation and implementation of comprehensive, tax sensitive estate plans and other wealth transfer plans.
We assist in the creation of wills, revocable trusts, irrevocable lifetime trusts, insurance trusts, charitable trusts, private foundations and other documents or entities which facilitate their planning. The firm also advises personal representatives and heirs on estate administration, and counsels trustees and beneficiaries on the complexities of trust administration.
Our lawyers also assist with the formation of partnerships, limited liability companies, foundations and other business entities, including deferred compensation vehicles that are increasingly a key element of a well-designed wealth preservation plan.
Intellectual Property Protection
The protection of the name, image and likeness is a critical element of comprehensive representation of athletes and entertainers. Our Sports and Entertainment Practice has substantial experience in protecting and licensing intellectual property rights – including entertainers' valuable right of publicity. We have negotiated licensing, endorsement, merchandising, and other promotional agreements involving major sports stars, including Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Our practice also includes working on agreements with athletes from a variety of major sports. For example, we have drafted endorsement agreements with NASCAR and CART drivers, and assisted in the drafting of the standard player agreement that was used by the Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA).
In an increasingly competitive era where almost every professional sports league has instituted a salary cap, luxury tax, or revenue sharing mechanism, it has become even more important for an athlete to maximize revenue opportunities off the field. In addition to the right of publicity, an athlete’s ability to control the licensing of his or her name is an extremely valuable asset. We also help our athlete clients obtain domestic and international trademark and service mark protection so that a player can prevent others from using his name without permission – whether on shoes or clothing, or in connection with an unauthorized endorsement of other businesses or services. This protection also extends to the Internet, where “cybersquatters” and “typo-squatters” commonly register the names of promising athletes (and common misspellings of their names) in the hopes of later selling these domain names for a profit. Given the increasing attention paid to high school age (and even younger) athletes, it’s likely that an athlete’s personal domain name (such as www.lebronjames.com) will be registered by someone else well before an athlete plays his or her first professional game. Dow Lohnes attorneys have helped businesses and individuals recover thousands of domain names and have helped to protect the names and trademark rights of internationally known entertainers, including Bruce Springsteen and Gloria Estefan. As personal websites for athletes and entertainers become more commonplace – whether as a way to connect with fans, for commercial opportunities, or for charitable purposes – obtaining proper legal advice in connection with such sites has become increasingly important. Given their special focus on technology-related matters, attorneys in the Intellectual Property practice group are uniquely suited to counsel athletes on the wide-variety of legal issues that arise in the operation of such sites, including by securing and clearing rights for the use of content online, negotiating hosting and software license agreements, and drafting privacy policies and terms of use.
Our lawyers also represent some of the nation’s largest media companies, such as Cox Communications (and its Cox Sports Television channel), Comcast Communications (and its Comcast SportsNet channel), Black Entertainment Television, and Pax TV, in negotiations with professional football, basketball, baseball, hockey, and soccer teams. Among other things, the firm has negotiated complex, multi-year agreements with teams such as the New Orleans Hornets, San Diego Padres, San Diego Chargers, and Arizona Diamondbacks, among numerous other professional sports teams.
Tax
The tax lawyers and other tax specialists in our Sports and Entertainment Practice have a comprehensive, diverse national practice in federal, state and local tax matters. They are experts in tax and financial accounting issues, especially as they relate to tax planning, audits, appeals and state and local taxes. Because of certain state and local tax laws that disproportionately impact professional athletes, such as the so-called “jock tax,” it is imperative that professional athletes have sound tax law counsel. Our tax practitioners assist our sports and entertainment clients in minimizing their exposure to various tax liabilities through the use of highly sophisticated and sound tax planning.
Nonprofit & Tax-Exempt Organizations
Community service and charitable giving are central issues to many of our athlete clients. Attorneys in our Sports and Entertainment Practice serve the legal needs of a wide variety of nonprofit organizations, including charitable organizations, and social welfare organizations. Several of our clients maintain and support charitable organizations operating in the areas of community development, educational enhancement and the arts.
We specialize in structuring and obtaining federal and state tax-exempt status for nonprofit entities, and advising clients on a day-to-day basis about a wide range of nonprofit tax and corporate issues. We routinely advise public charity clients on various tax issues such as unrelated business income tax, intermediate sanctions, lobbying and political activity limits, and receipt and substantiation of charitable gifts.
Real Estate
Attorneys in our Sports and Entertainment Practice also counsel our athlete clients in various real estate matters. A major area for our real estate lawyers is representation of developers on all aspects of the acquisition, development and operation of apartment complexes, office complexes and retail shopping centers. This representation includes negotiation of construction loans, mini-permanent loans and permanent loans for the financing of the projects. In addition to providing counsel regarding shopping centers, we provide assistance to owners of franchises in the development and operation of real estate within their franchise areas. We have represented large franchisees in the expansion of leased sites in markets such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Rochester, New York; Syracuse, New York; and Atlanta, Georgia. Within our commercial real estate practice, another specialty practice is the negotiation of leases both for landlords and tenants.
In addition to sports and entertainment clients, our real estate clients include other high net worth individuals, institutions, private and public companies and foundations. These clients are often acting as developers, owners, lenders, investors or operators. Our clients' projects are worldwide. We are called upon to deliver and coordinate legal advice with business objectives and deliver professional services in the most cost-efficient manner, whether for a simple project or a complex project. We pride ourselves on having handled projects in almost every U.S. state plus Mexico, France, England, Canada, Puerto Rico, Australia and the Bahamas. We welcome the opportunity to work with our clients in using real estate as a wealth building mechanism.
Litigation Services
Litigation services are also available to our sports and entertainment clients. Our litigators are well-known for their successful representation of taxpayers, including petitioner in the U.S. Supreme Court case, Newark Morning Ledger v. United States, and for its landmark estate tax victory in U.S. Tax Court in Estate of Samuel I. Newhouse v. Commissioner. The firm also has handled numerous important First Amendment and libel defense cases. In the sports area, our litigators represented three NBA players who filed lawsuits in federal district court in Texas seeking authorization to play professional basketball in Europe during the 1998 NBA owners’ lockout. Additionally, they have undertaken to resolve disputes involving trusts for minors, wage garnishments and the like.
Investment Management
While the rules regulating sports agents prohibit us from providing investment management advice to our athlete clients, we regularly review and evaluate a wide variety of investment products and financial planning techniques for our corporate and high net worth individual clients. Members of our corporate transactional team also have significant experience in evaluating business investment opportunities on behalf of our clients.
General Legal Services
Because of our reputation for providing superior services to our clients, various individuals and entities that represent professional athletes often refer their athlete clients to Dow Lohnes to obtain legal services apart from the negotiation of their player contracts. Such services in the past have ranged from estate planning, and the formation of charitable foundations, to litigation and certain intellectual property matters.
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News
August 2008:
Congratulations to Dow Lohnes client Maurice Jone-Drew on being featured in a promotional spot for the 20th anniversary edition of Madden NFL 09
May 2008:
Dow Lohnes Clients Matt Forte, Kendall Langford and Josh Barrett Selected in 2008 NFL Draft
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