The transfer portal has transformed college sports—just ask the Michigan men’s basketball team, which just won a national championship with five starters who started their college careers elsewhere.
A similar dynamic is playing out in the legal world, where law firms are raiding rivals for sports attorneys who can instantly import a big book of business. Lawyers live behind the biggest deals in sports, quietly guiding teams and investors as they navigate league politics, ownership rules, and the complexities of billion-dollar transactions.
Firms do not disclose how much they are paying the lawyers they’re poaching. But revenue-producing partners from major law firms are commanding high seven-figure annual compensation packages—and in some cases that’s stretching into eight figures, exceeding more than $10 million per year—according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
“The transfer portal is open for sports lawyers,” one leading sports attorney who has been approached, but not yet poached, tells Front Office Sports.
Latham & Watkins, which earlier this year added Matthew Eisler and Russell Hedman from Hogan Lovells, represented the estate of Paul Allen in connection with the recently completed sale of the Portland Trail Blazers to Tom Dundon. Kirkland & Ellis, which last year nabbed Frank Saviano from Latham and Jason Krochak from Proskauer Rose, advised Dundon’s group on that deal.
In November, Davis Polk landed Jon Oram from Proskauer—he’s a longtime legal sports powerhouse who advised New York Jets owner Woody Johnson in the acquisition of John Textor’s 43% stake in Premier League club Crystal Palace and the family of the late former Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen in the then-record $4.65 billion sale of the NFL team to a group led by Walmart heir Rob Walton.
Most recently, Simpson Thacher on Tuesday added three heavy hitters, bringing in Michael Kuh from Hogan Lovells, Eric Geffner from Sidley Austin, and Matthew Carpenter-Dennis, who comes from the NBA. Kuh advised on the NWSL’s launch and the 2026 FIFA World Cup bid for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, while Geffner has represented Monarch Collective and NWSL club Angel City, including on its 2024 sale at a record valuation of $250 million.
Kuh tells FOS he and Geffner—who years ago worked together at Latham—saw the move as “an opportunity to ensure that when people think of sports deals going forward, they think about Simpson Thacher.”
The same day, Cleary Gottlieb hired Matthew Schwartz from Gibson Dunn; his work includes advising the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia on LIV Golf and David Tepper on the $2.275 billion Carolina Panthers purchase in 2018.
“It’s definitely a trend,” says Brian Anderson, who co-leads the sports industry team at law firm Sheppard. “There’s a lot of firms out there looking to bolster their bench.”
That sentiment is shared by Irwin Kishner, co-chair of the sports law group at Herrick Feinstein, who has been with Herrick since 1992 and says he’s been approached “more than once” amid the recent wave of movement. He doesn’t dispute the level of offers being levied.
“It’s the law of economics, supply and demand,” Kishner tells FOS. “To get that kind of talent, you generally need to pay some sort of premium.”
The Catalyst Behind the Chaos
Historically, many law firms didn’t view sports as its own practice area, because sports-related work typically touches on other areas that firms do dedicate resources toward—such as deals, employment, and litigation.
But in recent years, sports as an asset class has exploded, with pro team valuations soaring and a larger ecosystem of leagues, media rights, sports betting, and private capital. All of this has created enough complexity and deal flow to justify sports-specific practices. A similar trend is happening in private equity, where firms have followed one another in standing up dedicated sports divisions to capitalize on the opportunities that exist in sports.
It’s not a coincidence that both are happening simultaneously.
Although sports franchise valuations have been rising for more than a decade—Kuh notes that while the S&P grew 700% between 2014 and 2024, NBA team valuations “grew by over 2,000%”—private-equity firms really entered the fold in a major way only around 2021. That’s when Arctos Partners made its first NBA deal by taking a minority stake in the Golden State Warriors, which Kuh calls “a demarcation point.”
After that, Kuh says, “Private equity went into sports in earnest. Today, PE is in every major sports league.”
Some firms identified the trend early. Sidley Austin, for instance, hired Chuck Baker and Irwin Raij away from O’Melveny & Myers LLP in 2022. They had a role in the $1.5 billion sale of the Minnesota Timberwolves to the group led by Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore, and represented Mitchell Rales, Magic Johnson, and others in the $6.05 billion Josh Harris–led purchase of the Washington Commanders.
More recently, Sidley advised The Ones Basketball League—Tracy McGrady’s upcoming one-on-one basketball league—in connection with its relaunch, and represented Ariel Investments on Project Level, a women’s sports-focused fund that in February announced it had secured $250 million and is still raising money.
Geffner, who until earlier this week worked with Baker and Raij at Sidley, points to women’s sports as a space that is still relatively “untapped,” with hockey and volleyball standing out as two sports that are on the rise, in addition to basketball with the WNBA and soccer with the NWSL.
“It’s not just the Caitlin Clark Effect,” he tells FOS. “A lot of people at first looked at women’s sports as a mission-based investment. They were trying to drive equity and get compensation for female athletes up. It’s shifted, and now it’s really a value proposition that’s growing rapidly.”
The trend has only accelerated since Sidley’s move in 2022. Attorneys say that it’s more than just the rise of private equity; there’s been a wider increase in sophisticated investors getting involved in sports.
“Years ago, buying a sports team was a vanity investment,” Kuh says. “Now, it’s a sector.”
That shift is also reshaping the pipeline. Interest from younger attorneys has surged alongside the deal flow, but breaking in still requires mastering a core practice area first.
“I tell associates and law school and college students that, for the first seven years of my career, I was just a traditional M&A and PE lawyer,” Geffner tells FOS. “I got trained and learned how to do deals before jumping into sports.”
