Sports Team & Entertainment Venue Consulting Services
The firm provides consulting advice on best practices for technology, intellectual property, privacy, and other business process issues, in addition to drafting, negotiating and reviewing vendor, platform and other services agreement and providing legal advice regarding stadiums, arenas, and other entertainment venues, like casinos and amusement parks.
Venues pose unique technology and legal issues. These entities generally operate outside of normal business hours and increasingly rely on tech for mission-critical, as well as important business functions, like ticketing, merchandising, social media, wayfinding and food and beverage services. And as critical functions are outsourced, support level agreements need to reflect expanded operating hours and the risks of increased functionality. Tech may appear simple on the front end, but robust functionality requires complex interoperability on the backend.
We’ve worked with a three-time World Champion NBA team for a number of years, assisting their legal and technology people with technical, business and legal solutions related to systems architecture and the integration of new programs, applications, and content, and helped solve the puzzle of smooth tech integration and functioning. We also cleared and integrated intellectual property rights so the team didn’t have involuntary partners, minimizing technical and legal risk, and ensuring freedom for their future business decisions, through careful evaluation of potential legal and business restrictions.
Through intellectual property and technology audits (often using relationships with longstanding technology partners), we provide objective, holistic advice, identifying legal, structural and other issues, and provide appropriate solutions. For example, if a client is developing an application for stadium use and doesn’t plan to license it to third parties, it may make sense to use open source or vendor software. Conversely, if the intended goal is downstream licensing, work for hire may be a better approach.
Obviously, there are significant benefits to well-functioning systems: technology life-cycle management, cost savings, forward and backward compatible technology and vendor interoperability, and ease of monetizing data. There are fan/customer-facing benefits, as well: increased merchandise sales, better fan/customer engagement, better navigation through venues, improved fan/customer experiences, and elimination of data and business process silos.
Autonomy and choice are ensured through careful intellectual property management: appropriate rights need to be transferred; the risks of open source platforms and embedded vendor materials have to be navigated; and the freedom to monetize your intellectual property may be maintained through careful negotiation and drafting, as well as preserving the right to choose to continue to work with a third party — rather than being stuck with them because of some embedded intellectual property.
Most entities have systems issues, as well as intellectual property problems, as both evolve through internal conflicts and compromise. Using best practices, we provide high-level technical and intellectual property audits, that are objective and avoid internal conflicts of interest. And when our audits reveal problems, we also provide technical and legal solutions.