NFL’s Patriots Tap Key Lawyer to Help Bill Belichick’s Successor

The New England Patriots have named Robyn Glaser, a lawyer and executive with the team’s ownership group, to be executive vice president of football business and senior adviser to new head coach Jerod Mayo.

Glaser’s newly-created role, which the Patriots confirmed this week and that she disclosed through her LinkedIn profile, makes her a key part of the club’s football management structure following the recent departure of head coach Bill Belichick, who won six Super Bowls leading the team.

Patriots spokesman Stacey James said Glaser will act as a kind of chief of staff to Mayo, who was drafted by the team as a player in 2008 before moving into coaching in 2019. Glaser will focus on special projects and other administrative matters related to football that will allow Mayo to keep his efforts focused on the field, James said.

Glaser, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, had previously been senior vice president of business affairs and chief administrative and compliance officer for the Patriots. That role saw her predominantly oversee non-football functions such as legal, compliance, finance, human resources, information technology, and league relations for the NFL franchise. Many of those areas dovetail with on-field matters, helping smooth Glaser’s transition, James said.

While women have made inroads working for the NFL and in the C-suites of the league and its 32 teams, they have remained relatively rare on the football side of the business. In 2022, the Cleveland Browns made Canadian lawyer Catherine Raîche the highest-ranking female football executive in NFL history by hiring her as an assistant general manager and vice president of football operations.

While Glaser’s new job won’t see her run all football operations, it’s designed to have her assist Mayo in doing the things he doesn’t want to do, James said. It also makes Glaser the highest-ranked woman to work on the football side of the Patriots business, he said.

Glaser’s path to the Patriots and their billionaire owner, Kraft Group LLC’s Robert Kraft, began in 2007 when the club hired the former corporate associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. At the time, Glaser had previously served as a vice president of business and legal affairs for new media at EMI, a music label in Los Angeles where she gained experience working on corporate strategy and negotiating digital media and technology deals.

Those skills would come in handy when Glaser returned to the Boston area in 2003 as an adviser to high-net-worth individuals, some of whom were making investments in the sporting space. In 2007, the same year that former Patriots general counsel Jack Mula left the club, Glaser replaced him as club counsel and became legal and business adviser for Kraft’s privately held company.

Finance & Football

The dual roles allowed Glaser to immerse herself in NFL affairs, working on everything from player contracts to social justice initiatives. Glaser, despite being a lawyer, has always operated outside of the club’s legal group, James said. The legal team remains led by James “Jim” Cobery, a veteran Kraft company lawyer who took on the job years ago from Richard “Dick” Karelitz.

Glaser’s nearly 17-year tenure with the Patriots saw her act as a jack-of-all-trades, said James, adding that she has vetted public relations materials and contract waivers. Glaser’s expertise with NFL paperwork and filings also led her to help Patriots players, including Mayo, on a variety of matters, such as setting up nonprofit foundations, James said.

One former Patriots player whom Glaser developed a working relationship with was the team’s longtime quarterback Tom Brady. She became a proponent of Brady’s TB12 health and wellness program, according to a 2017 profile by Glaser’s undergraduate alma mater Colby College. Brady turned to Glaser almost a decade ago to help acquire the internet domain name and other intellectual property related to TB12, as well as incorporate the company.

While working for Foxborough, Mass.-based Kraft Group, Glaser had a hand in legal and business activities related to its other assets, such as the shopping plaza Patriot Place, the Major League Soccer team New England Revolution, and Gillette Stadium, the home field for both the Revolution and Patriots.

It was for the Patriots, however, where Glaser gained a reputation as a key consigliere to the team’s owner. Glaser took the lead helping the Patriots navigate Deflategate, a 2015 scandal related to under-inflated footballs that saw the NFL appoint Paul Weiss, her former firm, to investigate the matter.

Paul Weiss continues to have close ties to the NFL and Glaser has credited the four years she spent at the firm in the late 1990s working on initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, and public and private financings for giving her the transactional chops necessary to break into professional sports.

“I had touched every single type of deal out there, in a million different industries,” Glaser said in her Colby College profile, which noted she did work for Paul Weiss clients like Major League Baseball and Calvin Klein.

Glaser’s new job comes at the start of a new chapter for the Patriots. The end of Belichick’s 24-year run came as Kraft celebrated the 30th anniversary of his acquisition of the club. Kraft, advised by his lawyers from what was then Boston’s Bingham, Dana & Gould, bought the team from Anheuser-Busch heir James Orthwein to prevent the Patriots from being relocated to St. Louis.