There’s no looking back for sports lawyer William “Billy” Traurig, who recently left his role as senior vice president and general counsel for the Carolina Hurricanes Hockey Club and PNC Arena to take over the newly created post of Chief Legal Officer at the North Carolina Education Lottery.
It’s a terrific new challenge and he didn’t even have to leave Raleigh.
Still, there is one thing he will miss. “It’s having my lunch in an empty PNC Arena and thinking to myself — How lucky I am,” Traurig told Sports Litigation Alert. He went to add that he will miss going to the games and “wandering around and marveling at how the people come to the games and put their worries aside, if even for just a couple hours. It was nice to be a part of an organization that made that happen.”
Nevertheless, it was time for Traurig, who has worked for the Hurricanes organization in various senior leadership roles since 1999.
The Lottery is a $2.8 billion a year sales and marketing organization, which has been steadily growing. It now delivers more than $700 million a year for education programs in North Carolina.
“It’s a great challenge to step into a role in which you don’t have much experience,” he said. “I had pretty much mastered what it took to manage the legal aspects of a professional sports franchise.”
Even more significant for Traurig was participating in an organization on the cusp of significant growth and which provides important funding for the state’s public schools.
“It’s an exciting time for our state lottery as it explores new ways to grow sales and new types of gaming,” he said. “It’s important that any growth that’s done is done responsibly and that it contributes to a good cause, and I look forward to assisting the lottery with those goals.”
This is especially true if the Lottery has a major role in managing legal sports betting if approved in the state.
Clearly, the leadership team at the Lottery had somebody like Traurig in mind when it scoped out the new position as one that would “oversee the increasing legal work resulting from the lottery’s growth and its expansion plans.”
Mark Michalko, executive director of the Lottery, said Traurig’s background, both in law and finance, made him “uniquely qualified” for the new position.
“Billy brings wide-ranging legal and financial experience from his work in a variety of roles over the course of many years with the Carolina Hurricanes organization,” said Michalko.
For Michalko, there was great familiarity with the work that Traurig had done.
For Traurig, who received his law degree from N.C. Central School of Law, it was an opportunity to further solidify his roots and “to help give back to the state and public education system that has been so good” to him and his family. Besides, he can still drop by PNC Arena for games, “wander around,” and marvel at the spectacle of professional sports.
