Layth Gafoor, a partner at Lucentem Sports & Entertainment Law, is the President of the Sports Lawyers Association, entering the second year of his two-year term.
At Lucentem, he advises on legal and business matters within the sports and entertainment industries. Specifically, Gafoor serves as counsel and agent to a variety of sporting organizations, teams, elite professional athletes and artists as well as clients who are in music, film and television. He is a coveted legal commentator and adviser to some of today’s leading organizations and is called upon to cover a wide variety of national and international sports and entertainment stories and analyze them from a Canadian legal framework.
As an expert in crisis management, Gafoor also works as an international speaker delivering his knowledge to audiences worldwide. He was born and raised in Toronto and participates in a number of pro bono initiatives in the city, including the LAWS program at the University of Toronto.
In the inaugural newsletter of SLA Update, a newsletter for the membership of the Sports Lawyers Association published by Hackney Publications, we sought out Gafoor for our regular interview, which follows below.
Question: How did you get your start in sports law?
Answer: I started my legal career on the corporate and litigation side. However, having participated in athletics throughout my life, I had many friends and colleagues who were engaged in various sports at the high-performance level. Eventually, I decided to change the direction of my practice so that I could be valuable in assisting my athlete friends with protecting some of their interests. I was fortunate enough to share the same alma mater (i.e., Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto) as one of our past presidents, Gord Kirk, who encouraged me to become a member of the SLA, and I immediately knew it was the sports law community for me.
Q: Why did you decide to pursue a leadership role in SLA?
A: I just wanted to be helpful to the community, and so I reached out to some of the board members at the time, seeking advice on how I could potentially be of assistance with some of the priority projects within the association. That gave me a great opportunity to work with many of the leaders on the board – Nona Lee, Matt Mitten, Bobby Hacker and Allison Rich, just to name a few. As it turned out, we were really at a crossroads as an organization in terms of what we saw as the future of the association and our desire to become the preeminent global sports law association. This led me to be a part of a strategic planning committee that really delved deeply in examining feedback from our membership and allowing that to lay the foundation for our strategic plan for the association.
Q: How significant is it that you bring an international perspective and international representation to SLA?
A: I think the timing of it is important. All of the major sports leagues and brands understand the importance of serving a global audience, as they cultivate their respective global images. I do believe many of my colleagues on the board share these same goals for the association. I think it is symbolic that I am from Canada, but it is simply a coming into fruition of the board’s long-contemplated vision that I am honored to assist in supporting the board.
Q: What are your goals for the second year of your term?
A: I really see my mandate as president as being a continuation of the incredible work of my predecessors, and both current and past board members. There are really three major strategic goals that I will continue to push forward and build on and they are as follows: (1) to increase the representation and impact of our younger members through our NextGen committee; (2) to build and strengthen a second platform, which is our fall symposium, as a means of complementing our industry-leading annual conference; and (3) to reimagine our annual conference in creative ways that takes our industry-leading conference to the next level, in a way that responds to and resonates with the association’s ever-evolving membership.
