MLB Clubs Restock Legal Teams Ahead of New Baseball Season

With spring training underway, several Major League Baseball teams are reshaping their in-house legal lineups with new recruits.

The Baltimore Orioles, Miami Marlins, and Seattle Mariners have all installed new general counsel ahead of Opening Day, a popular time for personnel changes, with some franchises seeking additional in-house legal firepower as they consider possible transactions and expand their business interests.

The Texas Rangers, winners of the 2023 World Series, have hired general counsel from two other organizations to bolster their growing law department, after Erin Kearney left the team’s general counsel job last month. Succeeding her is Eunice Nakamura, who since 2019 had been the top lawyer for Susan G. Komen, a Dallas-based nonprofit dedicated to preventing and curing breast cancer.

Joining the Rangers as an assistant general counsel is Scott Hays, who most recently was chief of staff and general counsel for Conference USA, where he also was sports administrator for men’s golf at the suburban Dallas-based collegiate athletic conference. Hays, who joined Conference USA in 2017, is now the lead lawyer for REV Entertainment LLC, a Rangers subsidiary specializing in sporting events, marketing, management, and production.

Robert Fountain, a former Rangers lawyer who now serves as the team’s head of human resources, confirmed that Nakamura is replacing Kearney as the club’s top lawyer with Hays focusing on REV-related legal work.

The Rangers announced in January a restructuring of their operations to create a new media company to broadcast their games. Neil Leibman, a former in-house lawyer at Exxon Mobil Corp. who has been president and COO of the Rangers, has left that role to lead the new media company and REV, which books non-baseball events at two stadiums owned by the Rangers.

Conference USA didn’t respond to a request for comment about its plans for replacing Hays.

Komen is “working on identifying the best candidate” to fill Nakamura’s role, a spokeswoman said. The breast cancer NGO’s most recent tax filing shows that she earned about $297,500 during fiscal 2022-23.

Nakamura said in a statement posted to LinkedIn that leaving the nonprofit was “bittersweet” given that she’s a breast cancer survivor. “Baseball and the law are two of my passions, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to combine the two,” she said about her new role.

Mets Legal Turnover

Kearney, who joined the Rangers in 2020, didn’t respond to a request for comment. She was initially hired by the Rangers’ former top lawyer, Katherine “Katie” Pothier, who joined the Mets in 2022.

The Mets are now searching for a new legal chief following Pothier’s January exit. Pothier confirmed via email that she’s started her own sports, entertainment, and real estate consultancy. She’ll continue to support the Mets in their search for her successor and said her new venture taps into the “venue and mixed-use development experience” she gained with the Rangers and San Diego Padres, another team for which she was once general counsel.

The Mets already have two co-general counsel in James Denniston and Jessica Villanella. They will look outside their existing ranks for Pothier’s permanent replacement, a team spokesman said. The Mets, sold in 2020 to hedge fund mogul Steven Cohen, hired a new CEO a little over a year ago as the club eyes building an $8 billion casino and entertainment complex adjacent to Citi Field, their home ballpark in Flushing, New York.

Another Mets attorney, Ennis Coble, departed this month to become senior counsel with the rival Washington Nationals. The Nats, whose legal chief is Betsy Philpott, recently promoted deputy general counsel John Bramlette to chief of staff and head of internal operations. Folasade Omogun Broadnax, a Nats staff counsel, took a new role this month as an associate general counsel for the nonprofit Universal Service Administrative Co.

Across the Sport

The Minnesota Twins, whose current ownership is considering a potential sale of the team from the Twin Cities, earlier this month announced the promotion of deputy general counsel Marisol “Mari” Guttman to general counsel.

Guttman is a former Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom associate who joined the Twins in 2021 after working for the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. She assumes day-to-day leadership of the Twins’ legal group and succeeds longtime legal chief Mary Giesler, who was hired as the team’s first general counsel in 2014. Giesler is now special counsel to the family of the late banker Carl Pohlad—who bought the Twins for $36 million in 1984—as they consider selling the club.

The Twins also named a new senior counsel in Marlo Miksche, who was promoted last month after joining the club a year ago from 3M Co., where she handled information technology and data protection matters.

The Atlanta Braves, the only publicly traded team in the league, elevated executive deputy general counsel Jonathan Smith in January to general counsel of their real estate subsidiary Braves Development Co. LLC, which owns a 60-acre, $550 million development around the club’s Truist Park. Smith’s promotion came after the Braves hired a new deputy general counsel in J. Hunter Knowles.

The Toronto Blue Jays brought on Cassels Brock & Blackwell corporate associate Gerrit Yau as a director of legal affairs and counsel in January. Yau joined the Blue Jays after almost two years in private practice.