are you giving me head??? these are labor lawyers. what can they do to build a major basketball conference?
every day gets worse
They're not just labor lawyers News.
All the big firms get a piece of sports/entertainment.. but it's fair to say Proskauer is a leader in the field. Look it up, at some point they've represented all the major sports organizations; NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL
A lot of it has been labor stuff, that's true.. simply because collective bargaining agreements with the players' unions are pretty high profile stuff.
But they've also represented the PAC12 in their recent deal w/ fox, brought Beckham to MLS, did the financing agreement on the new Met Life stadium, represented Woody Johnson when he bought the Jets... it goes on and on.
David Stern, Gary Bettman, and the Yankees' Randy Levine all started as associates at Proskauer.
What's newsworthy to me, is not that the catholic 7 hired Big Law, but that they didn't go with Covington. I read a few weeks ago that Paul Tagliabue was running things behind the scenes when the 7 schools decided to break away. That would make a lot of sense because in addition to being a former NFL commissioner, he's also the chairman of trustees at his alma mater.. Georgetown.
And, he's a partner at Covington a huge DC firm with plenty of pro sports experience of their own. Two years ago, Marinatto hired Tagliabue and Covington to consult on something like "strategic planning"; the plan they came up with was to make the BE a national football conference? How'd that work out?
So, it's reasonable to theorize that hiring Proskauer is an indication that the other 6 schools have decided to change course, and decisions for the new league are NOT being driven by Georgetown and Tags. It would appear NYC is the source of decision making power for the new league, and not DC (or Providence for that matter). I don't know that for fact of course, but you could defiantly read it that way based on this decision.