The National Hockey League seems poised to lock out its players if the two sides aren’t able to reach a new collective bargaining agreement by September 15. Both the players and the owners can look to recent labor disputes in the National Basketball Association and the National Football League for guidance. But hockey players may want to pay particularly close attention to the maneuverings of NFL players, who didn’t just depend on the negotiation process and litigation. Behind the scenes, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) relied on legal handiwork of a more unconventional nature in the labor dispute that led to a 132-day lockout. Latham & Watkins partner David Barrett (pictured), working on behalf of the NFLPA, put together a first-of-its-kind insurance policy that would pay players if a work stoppage led to the cancellation of games.
The idea came from an April 2009 brainstorming session between Barrett and DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFLPA, while both were attending a retired NFL players conference in Palm Springs. Smith and Barrett were old work buddies: Smith, who’d joined the NFLPA in March 2009 from Patton Boggs, had been a partner at Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C. The duo had worked on several toxic tort cases together and had stayed in touch over the ensuing years. (Smith has referred a substantial amount of union work to Latham. During a 12-month period ending in February 2011, Latham was the union’s top law firm biller at $3.1 million, according to U.S. Department of Labor filings.)
