By Drew Schott
As Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the Sacramento Kings, Jeff Dorso is not only responsible for issues directly involving the National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise. His role also concerns matters affecting the Kings’ affiliates including the Golden 1 Center – the Kings’ arena – Sacramento’s Kimpton Sawyer Hotel, a Minor League Baseball team in the Sacramento River Cats and Sutter Health Park, the River Cats’ home venue that is the temporary stadium of Major League Baseball’s Athletics.
According to Dorso, the Kings were one of the first franchises to look beyond the team and arena by viewing a sports organization as “an entertainment business.” These ancillary entities, per Dorso, have enabled the Kings to both impact fans’ experiences and create revenue potential for the organization.
“In terms of success, we’ve found it to be immensely helpful,” Dorso said. “To give one concrete example, the hotel we own, developed and operate with a management company is right across from the arena. Every team that comes to play in our venue and every artist who’s staying overnight stays at our hotel. We then control that experience. When an artist stays the night, we can have a gift package welcoming them to Sacramento. We can have a Sacramento Kings jersey with Garth Brooks on it or another artist that helps create that dynamic experience, which is really what being in the entertainment and sports business is all about. It’s about creating the experience, so we’ve found that being involved in other businesses improves the experience for both your guests and your talents and ultimately, makes it a more rewarding experience.”
Dorso’s remarks came on April 11 during the “Stadiums & Venues” panel of the Tulane Entertainment & Sports Law Conference, which also included Los Angeles Clippers General Counsel Jennifer Lewis and Vicky Neumeyer, the Senior Vice President/General Counsel of the New Orleans Pelicans and the New Orleans Saints. The discussion – sponsored by Louisiana law firm Stone Pigman – was moderated by Gabe Feldman, Professor at Tulane University Law School and Director of the Tulane Sports Law Program.
Similar to the Kings owning the Golden 1 Center, the Clippers operate both the Intuit Dome and the Kia Forum in Inglewood. However, the Pelicans and Saints are in a different position, as they are tenants in the Caesars Superdome and the Smoothie King Center since both venues are owned by the state of Louisiana. The Pelicans and Saints have use agreements with the stadiums and are the primary operators of the venues for only a limited number of days. However, both the Pelicans and the Saints still look to influence the fan experience on gameday, from entertainment events before the gates open to cleaning up the venue following an event.
“We do try to have overlap,” Neumeyer said. “Our teams’ owner (Gayle Benson) owns an interest in the Hyatt Regency, which is near the Superdome, so we try to have a good experience there and get our players to stay there. It’s the team hotel. We try to get opposing teams to stay there as well and have that continuity where we can, but also we’re very careful to not try to step on the feet and the authority of the state. The state owns it, they hire a management group with which we work. The managing group is Legends now and they handle the building, they hire the security and they oversee the concessions there.”
Regarding the Clippers, Lewis said that the franchise shapes the fan experience early on because it operates a one-to-one ticketing relationship. While fans can buy tickets through Ticketmaster, the ticket then gets automatically transferred to an Intuit Dome account, which they have to set up. This gives the Clippers information that enhances fans’ time in the “tech forward” Intuit Dome, which opened in 2024.
“We can tailor your experience when you come,” Lewis said. “If you are a season ticket holder and you like regular popcorn, we can incentivize you. If you cheer loudly, you get a free popcorn in your account and things like that. Your face can become your ticket. You can opt into what we are referring to as GameFace ID. It’s basically biometrics… and once you get a ticket in your Intuit Dome account if you’ve opted in, you don’t need to ever take your phone out. You can upload your credit card, your ticket’s already there and you just walk right into the arena. You can take merchandise and if your credit card’s in there, it will charge you.”
Other technological aspects of the Intuit Dome include power outlets at every seat, buttons that allow fans to play games on the arena’s Halo Board and the ability to track how loud people are cheering. Based on the technology and privacy implications of the Clippers’ new venue, Lewis sought outside counsel to assist on matters involving data, privacy and biometrics and shared that a firm has been working with her on matters involving these areas since less than two weeks into her tenure. So far, there have been “zero issues” and the Clippers’ legal team is staying “on top of” the latest privacy developments impacting California and the country.
Sponsorships and activations also play a key role in the operation of stadium and venues, as it is an area that Dorso said has grown “tremendously” due to the amount of assets a team can offer a company. In addition to arena signage, teams can provide sponsors with franchise-affiliated content for social media through in-house production crews. Additionally, franchises that own various teams and businesses like the Kings have the ability to partner with a sponsor and place their logo and products in different areas across a team’s portfolio.
“We have multiple teams, so we can sell a sponsorship in the ballpark for baseball,” Dorso said. “We can include it for basketball. We can put it in our hotel. If you’re a toilet paper company, instead of just having the toilet paper in the arena, you can now have that in the hotel, in a shopping mall and in a baseball stadium.”
Lewis added that while arena naming rights deals are getting “more and more lucrative,” companies involved in these purchases are seeking increased exclusivity. For example, the Clippers’ partnership with Intuit gives the franchise “very few carveouts” in the areas of accounting and financial software. Meanwhile, Dorso said that when negotiating exclusivity agreements with sponsors, teams must implement exceptions for when a league controls the signage visible on a broadcast. Due to the rise of decentralized finance including Bitcoin and other blockchain technology, he also noted the importance of accounting for possible technology changes that may occur, but do not exist at the time an agreement is drafted.
Regarding the distinction between team sponsorship contracts and endorsement deals independently signed by players, players are entitled to the revenue from their own endorsement contracts under the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement. As a result, Dorso commented that when the Kings run a sponsorship campaign, the franchise has limitations on how players’ images can be used to market the product and add revenue. However, teams are allowed to use several players in an image that does not highlight a particular athlete. Additionally, there are guidelines regarding how teams can use game footage and images to sell sponsorships.
Another sponsorship-related development associated with collective bargaining agreements is teams being allowed to use group player license rights. The National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) states that any entity wanting to use six or more players on products or merchandise must receive a license to do so from the NFLPA. Players are then paid for their participation in group player license initiatives through different types of royalty payments.
“We make it clear in our sponsorship agreements,” Neumeyer said. “We include a clause when they have group player rights that the player is not allowed to appear as an endorser of your product.”
Jersey patch agreements are an additional factor of a general counsel’s work in the sponsorship sphere. Lewis specifically discussed the Clippers’ exclusive jersey patch partner, Visit Rwanda, the marketing phrase for the Rwanda Development Board.
“You have to think about, ‘Okay, what’s the patch deal?” Lewis said. “‘What are their assets?’ But also, it’s a foreign entity. It’s a government entity, so now we have to layer in FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and sanction law. Now all of a sudden, I now have to deal with what happens if they’re sanctioned and money can’t come. The league, of course, has approvals over all this and the league has very strong opinions on these types of things too. These are interesting dynamics. As the league is getting more international, more international partners want to come in and play either through sponsorships or other sorts of distribution.”
Events, “Stadiums & Venues,” Tulane Entertainment & Sports Law Conference, (April 11, 2026), https://eslawconference.wp.tulane.edu/schedule-2026-draft/.
Drew Schott is a J.D. Candidate at Tulane University Law School. He is also a current Staff Writer for The Sports Lawyer Monthly.
