NFL Has Deep Candidate Pool for Highly Desired Law Chief Job

The NFL legal chief’s retirement has brought speculation as to who will land one of the most lucrative and high-profile general counsel jobs in all of professional sports.

Bloomberg Law spoke with nearly a dozen people familiar with the NFL and its operations to identify leading candidates to succeed L. Jeffrey Pash, a former partner at Covington & Burling who spent more than 25 years in the post. The people requested anonymity because the NFL’s search process is private.

Possible successors include Lawrence “Larry” Ferazani Jr., a former FBI agent and ex-federal prosecutor who has worked at the NFL for nearly two decades; Major League Soccer general counsel Anastasia Danias Schmidt; and Brook Gardiner, general counsel for the senior US soccer circuit’s developmental league affiliate MLS Next Pro.

Jeff Pash

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“You need someone who knows about labor issues and the broadcast side of the business,” said Jodi Balsam, a former NFL lawyer who worked for Pash and is now a professor at Brooklyn Law School. “Success comes from protection of the league’s long-term interests, and that often comes from longevity in the job.”

Pash, 67, is stepping down as the league considers key changes, such as allowing private equity firms to purchase up to 30% stakes in NFL franchises. The NFL’s collective bargaining agreement, which expires in 2030, will require planning for issues such as potential work stoppages. Broadcast rights, including new streaming platforms, and the international market will also be issues the general counsel faces.

The league will retain an executive search firm to finalize a short list of candidates and then solicit the opinions of the 32 NFL team owners. Pash will remain in the top legal role to assist with the search and transition, commissioner Roger Goodell said in a memo last week.

The NFL declined to discuss its succession planning process.

The Candidates

• Ferazani is considered an internal favorite. The deputy general counsel for labor relations was picked to succeed the retired Dennis Curran as general counsel for the NFL Management Council, the powerful body that negotiates labor deals for the league with players. His role in the labor trenches makes him well-known and respected among NFL owners.
• Other internal options are Janet Nova, an NFL deputy general counsel for media and business affairs hired in 2019 after working at 21st Century Fox Inc. and News Corp., and senior vice president of legal and business affairs Dolores DiBella, a litigator who has risen quickly through the in-house ranks.
• Danias Schmidt is a former deputy general counsel for litigation at the NFL, where she had a role in the league’s long-running concussion cases and other matters such as Deflategate. Gardiner is a former NFL labor lawyer who left for a role at Comcast Corp.-owned NBCUniversal Media LLC, one of the league’s broadcast partners, before moving to MLS in 2022.
• Lawyers working for NFL teams are also possibilities. These potential candidates include Myles Pistorius from the Miami Dolphins, Jason Cohen of the Dallas Cowboys, and Hannah Gordon, a former NFL labor lawyer and chief legal and administrative officer for the San Francisco 49ers. Gordon left the club earlier this year to launch her own consultancy.
• Two of the NFL’s top outside lawyers—Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison chairman Brad Karp and Proskauer Rose chairman emeritus Joseph Leccese—are likely less of an ideal fit for the league given how further along they are in their careers and how much it could cost to bring them in-house. If the league wanted to tap one of its outside lawyers for the job, it would have likely done so already to prepare them for the role, people said.

Small Fraternity

The skills required for the job are myriad. Besides being an excellent technical lawyer, a prospective NFL legal chief needs to have the institutional knowledge and relationships necessary to navigate league politics. That individual also must have the gravitas to build consensus in boardrooms filled with big egos.

Pash is one of the more high-profile and top paid law department leaders. He received more than $55 million in collective total compensation between 2008 and 2015, federal tax filings by the New York-based league show. That period marks only about one-third of his time as the NFL’s top lawyer.

Pash’s forthcoming farewell tour was the talk of the Sports Lawyers Association’s annual conference this week in Baltimore, said N. Jeremi Duru, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.

The two negotiated during Duru’s time at the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a group that pushed the NFL to adopt the “Rooney Rule,” one of the first corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Thanks to the Rooney Rule and other efforts, the NFL’s C-suite looks much different than it did in decades past, Duru said. League executives like Dasha Smith Dwin and Jonathan Beane—both of whom have law degrees—are now respectively in charge of human resources and diversity and inclusion and will likely have a hand in recruiting and vetting Pash’s replacement, Duru said.

The league’s next legal chief will join a small fraternity.

Pash took over from Jay Moyer, who died at 83 in March. Moyer in the early 1980s succeeded the late Marshall Leahy, a San Francisco lawyer who like Pash was once a candidate for commissioner. Leahy, like Pash, also spent more than two decades as the NFL’s chief counsel.