Good Lawyers, Good Sports?: The Professional Identity of Sports Lawyers Representing Not-For-Profit Entities

ABA accreditation standards require law schools to develop students’ professional identity, including by encouraging “an intentional exploration of” the legal profession’s “values and guiding principles.” This Essay invites legal academia as well as practitioners to explore issues of legal ethics, professionalism, and, especially, professional identity in the context of a new area of legal practice: sports lawyers’ representation of “NIL collectives,” which are not-forprofit entities that college boosters establish to enable college athletes to benefit financially from their name, image and likeness (“NIL”). The work of sports lawyers advising NIL collectives offers an interesting case study for considering how professional values might come into play when lawyers counsel clients and particularly when lawyers counsel not-for-profit entities. NIL collectives may be skirting the tax laws that require not-for-profit entities to serve a public, not private, purpose or circumventing the NCAA’s rules, which forbid its member universities from using NIL compensation to recruit athletes. Even if they are not breaking the law, the collectives may appear to be acting unfairly in how they use financial inducements to assemble winning teams. Lawyers advising NIL collectives might take different views of whether to prompt the client’s representatives to consider the rightness or fairness of the enterprise. Their decision whether and how to counsel their clients about “fair play” in this context will be informed by their sense of professionalism and their understanding of professional values, which are not fixed and uncontested. Among other things, this example illustrates that broadly accepted professional values are only a small subset of the values that shape individual lawyers’ professional identity, influencing how they conduct their work. Therefore, to a large extent, law schools’ role in developing future lawyers’ professional identity requires helping students ascertain their own professional values and how their values apply to particular work.