The Am Law Daily reported last month that tax filings made by the National Football League and its collective bargaining arm, the NFL Management Council, show that the league paid its outside lawyers at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Covington & Burling, and Proskauer Rose a combined total of at least $15 million during its 2011 fiscal year, a 12-month span in which the NFL waged a fierce labor battle with the union representing players.
At the time, we could not compare the NFL Players Association’s legal spending for roughly the same period—April 1, 2011, through March 31, 2012—because the relevant union tax filing was not yet publicly available. In fact, there was some speculation that the tax filing—as well as a separate filing required by the U.S. Department of Labor covering the period in question—would never materialize given the NFLPA’s decision to disband prior to filing an antitrust suit against management amid the lengthy lockout that preceded the completion of a new labor pact in July 2011.
This week, however, The Am Law Daily obtained copies of the two union filings, which contain detailed information about the NFLPA’s spending on in-house and outside counsel during the collective bargaining standoff. (The union’s Form 990 tax filing covers the period from March 1, 2011, through February 29, 2012. Its LM-2 filing meanwhile, covers the period from July 26, 2011, through February 29, 2012, when the NFLPA’s rank and file voted to decertify the union.)
The NFLPA’s tax filing shows that all of the union’s top five expenditures on outside independent contractors went to law firms. Leading the way, with nearly $6.1 million in fees earned for serving as the union’s lead antitrust and outside counsel: Dewey & LeBoeuf, the now-defunct firm whose former global litigation chair Jeffrey Kessler—now head of the antitrust practice and cochair of the sports law group at Winston & Strawn—played a major role in the labor negotiations.
