Minnesota Law students have helped analyze potential endorsement agreements and other deals for some 100 student-athletes in the three years since the Law School’s Sports & Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) Clinic made its debut.
Clinic students are also influencing best practices in the rapidly evolving NIL landscape, in some instances rewriting contracts into more robust agreements. Agents have accepted these changes and gone on to use them with clinic clients and student-athletes elsewhere.
With NIL-related developments happening frequently — including a possible court settlement that could allow Division 1 schools to pay students directly for using their name, image, and likeness — each clinic session this year includes a current event segment to promote “real-time learning.”
Perhaps most popular with students are the clinic’s “field trips.” Those have included attending a Gopher women’s basketball game (shortly after reviewing an NIL agreement for one of the team’s players), a visit to a Minneapolis-based agency that represents athletes and brands, and taking in a Minnesota Timberwolves game. Clinic students also have met with a Timberwolves executive and officials of the University’s Athletics Department.
Growing demand — based on the popularity of college and professional sports and strong interest in NIL as an emerging area of the law — could see the Sports and NIL Clinic expand to eight students in the fall. The clinic, a partnership between the Law School and Fredrikson & Byron, launched with four students in 2022 and grew to six over the last two years.
Chris Pham, a shareholder at Fredrikson & Byron teaches the clinic as an adjunct professor with Fredrikson associate Tarun Sharma ’22, who helped found the clinic when he was a Minnesota Law student.
“The NIL space has evolved even in the last three years, and our clinic has had to do the same,” Pham says. “I imagine the NIL space will continue to evolve even this year, and so will our clinic. We embarked on this journey when NIL was a brand-new thing. Nobody had seen what these contracts should look like, what the deals should be like. Being able to review these with the law students, we’re very much learning at the same time that they are.”
Pham and Sharma both have heard from representatives of other law schools or students at other schools who ask for tips on starting similar efforts.
“As far as I’m aware, there aren’t any that are like ours, in the sense that we are providing pro bono legal services for the athletes,” Pham says. “We’re actually representing them, providing them advice and legal guidance in their NIL deals. I know that other law schools have seminars and courses and programs in sports law and NIL. I don’t know that that’s the same type of clinic that we have.”
As a Law School student, Sharma says, he appreciated gaining transactional work experience in the Business Law Clinic. Offering more such opportunities was part of the thinking behind starting the Sports and NIL Clinic.
“We were seeking to explore this interest in sports and give it a venue for students who had an interest in working with this subject matter,” Sharma says. “We also wanted to create a way that students could really focus on transactional issues and get that practical work experience within the safety of the Law School.”
Practical learning in the Sports and NIL Clinic happens on several levels.
“This experiential learning piece, it’s not just being able to identify issues in a contract,” Pham says. “It’s the field trips. Why do we do that? It’s about networking. They don’t necessarily teach you that in law school. But as lawyers, particularly if you end up in private practice, that’s a big part of what you do. So, we add that component.”
A number of student athletes are repeat clinic clients, including Gopher women’s hockey forward Audrey Wethington (B.S. ’23; MBS ’25). Wethington, who will next go to medical school, had the clinic review two NIL agreements, to help avoid any eligibility issues and unfavorable provisions.
“They pointed out things that I probably would never have realized had I not used their services,” Wethington says of the clinic. “And most of the time, the NIL groups are willing to make those changes. Having an extra set of eyes on the deals was really big for me.”
Lucy Gibbons ’25, a student director of the Sports and NIL Clinic, says NIL agreements have become more favorable to student athletes over her two years in the clinic.
“When I started, it felt like the student athletes had less bargaining power, because it was kind of ‘agree to our terms or you don’t get this deal,’” Gibbons says. “Now the agencies, the brands, the companies are much more actively wanting the student athlete. Not that they didn’t before, but now it’s much more like
‘We will make this however you want it, so we’ll get your business.’”
Her clinic experience in reviewing NIL contracts and in client engagement have been valuable to her in law clerk roles and will be of use in any area of law she pursues, Gibbons says.
Clinic student director Yiyang Chen ’25 says his two years with the Sports and NIL Clinic have been among his greatest experiences at the Law School.
“I would consider it a highlight, because we participate in all kinds of activities that are pretty different from the traditional law school classroom experience,” Chen says. “We go to field trips, talk to all different kinds of people. And then as a student director, we also try to get the new students involved in the clinic and organize everything. That’s helped me become a better leader too.”