Sports Law is comprised of two major divisions: Amateur and professional sports. Amateur sports cover high school and collegiate leagues. Attorneys working in this field handle cases with the implementation of Title IX, recruiting and fair competition regulations, student-athlete conduct standards, and other features unique to amateur sports. Professional can represents players, player’s groups, franchises, and leagues that operate at the national level.

Sports Law is interesting because at both the amateur and professional levels respectively, there are internal laws and procedures that govern each sport community in addition to the traditional legal framework that members of the sport community must abide by. While these rules in many ways do not carry the same imperative and potentially grave consequences for violation of formal laws, governing bodies in sports seek to have the rules applied with the same emphasis on consistency and uniformity associated with the traditional legal realm.

Entertainment Law covers the transactions of money and services between parties, and the protection of clients’ interests, across all of the major genres of entertainment (e.g., music, cinema, television, theater, gaming, etc). Music attorneys, for instance, might represent musicians as they pursue deals with record labels, or they might represent record labels seeking to negotiate more equitable deals with new and current artists.

Sports and Entertainment Law are both very high-profile fields, which means that new and successful independent practices are rare and difficult to fund. Practicing attorneys share that the reward of being in Sports and Entertainment Law comes from hands-on engagement with something that you love - be it sports, music, cinema, and so on - as well as the opportunity to travel regularly all across the nation and beyond for a living.

There is little statistical or other evidence suggesting that the course of Sports Law will be changing much in the next ten years, but Entertainment Law is going through a period that is attracting young attorneys under a promise of job security. Not every niche is booming today (See video #2, 10:35), but there is much speculation about the future of the music industry in particular, including how it will be consumed, how it will be distributed, and how artists will be compensated. There are opportunities for appropriately innovative attorneys well-versed in modern music consumption to find work in the multitude of pioneering music deals, occurring more and more often as technology makes it easier to connect artist to audience every day.