NBA Champion Denver Nuggets Recruit New In-House Legal Pair

The Denver Nuggets, which won the team’s first NBA title this week in its 47-year-history, have added two new lawyers to their ranks.

Kroenke Sports & Entertainment LLC brought on Lynette Jones and C. Taylor White last month for new roles as the Denver-based holding company expanded the size of its legal team.

Jones, hired as a deputy general counsel, most recently was a principal counsel for commercial marketing at the Walt Disney Co. New associate general counsel White spent the past year as acting legal chief for the NHL’s Dallas Stars.

Kroenke Sports was founded by billionaire E. Stanley Kroenke, who separately owns the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, who won the Super Bowl in 2022. Kroenke owns the Nuggets, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche and Major League Soccer’s Colorado Rapids.

Kroenke’s legal group now has a handful of lawyers and two senior paralegals, Jones said. White and Jones report to Keirstin Beck, who joined Kroenke as its general counsel in 2021.

Kroenke last year saw former assistant general counsel Margaret Walters Foltz exit to take the top legal job with the Kansas City Current of the National Women’s Soccer League.

Jones, who lives in Los Angeles, expects to relocate to Denver by year’s end. Her new role involves content and music licensing, commercial contracts, sponsorships, strategic partnerships, and some litigation management, she said.

She joins Kroenke Sports at a time of rising valuations for professional sports teams, which have become recession-proof investments as they intersect with broadcast and streaming media deals, digital assets, and sports betting.

Jones last year interviewed attorney and human rights activist Amal Clooney as part of her work with the Southern California chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel, the world’s largest organization of in-house lawyers.

Career Transition

Jones made her move into the sports world after a decade in the media industry. She said lawyers looking to transition from private practice to in-house should try to find jobs where they can contribute in a transactional role.

At Disney, Jones worked with commercial marketing teams supporting the media conglomerate’s subsidiaries ABC, ESPN, Freeform, and Hulu. Prior to that she was at AT&T Inc. and its former affiliates DirecTV and WarnerMedia.

Those jobs helped Jones sharpen her skills handling everything from negotiating all kinds of broadcast deals—be they for local stations, cable and pay-per-view, or regional sports networks—to working on sponsorship, production, content and programming, and advertising and marketing matters.

Jones said most sports industry job descriptions will list among their key requirements expertise in one or more of those fields. If lawyers aren’t working on those skills in their current positions, they can still learn in those areas by volunteering at a local law school’s entertainment law clinic or a legal aid foundation providing free legal sport to small businesses.

“Community service becomes part of your network,” Jones said. “The mindset that networking is more about what you can do for others may land you the next opportunity.”

As for the Stars, a spokesman said the team hasn’t decided it if will rehire for White’s position. The Stars employ legal counsel Rachael Lopez, who remains with the club after being hired a year ago.