Just how important is the employment history of an attorney being considered for a general counsel post at a professional sports franchise?
Vitally important. Few jobs require such an amalgamation of skills and knowledge as being a team’s GC.
This truism is borne out time and time again in an industry where attorneys must know a little bit about every area of law. For a prime example, look no further than Scott Wilkinson, Vice President, Chief Legal Officer, and Assistant General Manager of the Atlanta Hawks.
Wilkinson was an athlete, attending Duke University on a football scholarship; a Judge Advocate in the United States Marine Corps; a founding member and sports agent for Buoniconti Sports Management Group, LLC; and an attorney in private practice with Moore & Van Allen in Durham, NC and Ginsburg, Feldman and Bress in Washington D.C. before that.
His unique background and his current success with the Hawks made him a logical candidate for an interview by Sports Litigation Alert Contributing Editor Rahat Huq, which follows:
Huq: How did you end up with the Atlanta Hawks?
Wilkinson: The short answer is that there was a law school classmate that I used to play a lot of basketball with who was an in-house lawyer with Turner when Turner owned the Braves, the Hawks, the Thrashers, World Championship Wrestling, and Goodwill Games. World Championship Wrestling was taking off in 1999 and was meeting all the cable wars and David [the aforementioned classmate] was looking for a counsel to handle World Championship Wrestling as well as some of the new work for the inaugural Thrashers season. So, we were talking, he got me an interview, and I ended up getting a job at Turner doing wrestling part-time and Thrashers part-time and just helping with general business work for the Hawks and TNT Sports and the Braves and all the properties. Once I got in at Turner, as people move on and shuffle, I moved on to do more Braves-Hawks-Thrashers and then, when the team was sold in 2004, Turner sold off the Thrashers, Hawks and Philips Arena to the Atlanta Spirit, and I came over with the Atlanta Spirit as the general counsel. At Turner, I had just been a senior counsel and assistant general counsel, and when I came over they brought me over as the general counsel. And once I was here as general counsel, when the assistant GM left in 2005, when they were looking to replace somebody, I just was the interim assistant GM, and they liked what I did, so I picked up that title as well.
Huq: You are both Chief Legal Officer as well as assistant general manager. What percentage of your duties involve player personnel issues as opposed to just general business issues?
Wilkinson: It really depends on the time of year, to assign percentages. The month before the trade deadline, it could be 75 percent of duties. During the month of June, it will be 90 percent or more all-Hawks. But it’s really a combination. As a lawyer, I could be doing contracts for all of our coaches. At the same time, I’ll try to be part of draft preparation and attend those meetings, but more as an observer. I don’t go out on the road and scout because I do all the admin that nobody else wants to do related to the Hawks. So June will be full with that and we’ll also be signing draft picks and preparing for free agency which begins July 1st, or right after the moratorium. So we’ll have to have all of that stuff in the can and all of our negotiation prep books ready to go in the month of June. So June is usually stacked up to be a busy month and then depending on how many free agents we have, July is a busy month as well. Then, as we’re doing all of that, along with a junior counsel, I manage our cap. So for every move that we contemplate, we run the scenario not only if it’s a trade or a signing, we have to run all of the cap projections out five years just so we know the impact of every move that we do. If we’re contemplating trades, we’ll do all of the trade research. And then, I also handle the risk management. So we also do all of the updating of all of the accidental policies and general corporate insurance and scheduling preseason games. So this can take all of my time or 10 percent of my time, depending on the time of year.
Huq: Can you go deeper into the insurance and risk management aspect of your job?
Wilkinson: I kind of fell into it. One of the previous controllers that was here didn’t really want to do it anymore so I said I would do it. So I kind of picked it up. And I have a great outside risk management group and they help me too. So there are league required policies for temporary disability for players. So, for example, Al Horford missed 55 games, and for the league TTD policy, once you hit 41 games, you begin to collect ‘back pay’ that you’ve paid the player at an 80 percent rate. So for high dollar players, we insure our five highest paid players. So in the event that they do have an injury that makes them miss more than 41 games, we get back 80 percent of their salary until that injury is healed and they get back on the court. We also have accidental death policies where we insure a player’s contract in the event of an accidental death. So we manage that. So all that is, is that when a player comes on and off the roster, maybe a couple of times a year, then we have to update that through the league.
Huq: You’re job description mentions that you handle ‘collective bargaining agreement issues.’ If everything’s already been negotiated and set in stone, what exactly does that entail?
Wilkinson: It entails mostly just knowing the exceptions, knowing the rules under the CBA for trades and for signing players, extending players, max players etc. Each one of those areas has set rules. Now it’s not rocket science but you do have to at least have a basic understanding to be able to do any one of those things. So that’s what I do as part of CBA issues and salary cap management.
