Mr. Antonio Quintero Rodríguez is a member of Laurea Lex Sportiva (before Carrero & Quintero) a leading boutique firm specialising in sports and entertainment. He has 15 years of experience in sports law and has held several positions in sports organisations. He holds a law degree from the Universidad Metropolitana. He also holds an LLM in international sports law from ISDE and IEB. He further holds a degree as football coach and a degree in litigation.

Describe your career to date.

I have developed my entire professional career as a trial attorney. I am a very competitive person. Thus, litigation in sports law is my main field. Part of being competitive is to understand when you form part of the teams of your positions and obligations. The idea is always to help the team to reach the goal by helping from your position.

Also, my career has led me to some positions within sports organisations, understanding how they work from the inside and helping me to conduct teams to achieve certain goals through strategic planning.

How do you establish a detailed understanding of a client’s business to advise them effectively?

We begin by trying to understand who the client is, what is their context, and what is their goal. These three questions that we ask ourselves should tell us what exactly they want to achieve, what is the controversy (including threats and opportunities) and how they want to achieve the objective. Of course, a small conversation with the potential client is the start, but it is followed by research on the three topics we just mentioned and then a second conversation to explain the different scenarios to creatively find a solution and establish a plan.

During our research, we also focus on our networks to see if we need some help from other professionals. Among our networks, we belong to two very important organizations. The first one is AIAF (International Association of Football Lawyers), where we have access to sports lawyers in several parts of the world. The second one is Lextendi, a network of leading boutique law firms specialized in several fields of law, where we have access to lawyers from other areas outside of the sports world.

What regulatory challenges are sports clients currently encountering, and how are you navigating them?

We have noticed when advising clients such as sports institutions, that the biggest regulatory challenge is to guarantee due process to those who are being tried in disciplinary proceedings within the institution. You need to prepare the institution for a possible appeal to CAS and also to the court of public opinion. Thus, they need to be prepared from the very beginning with proper legal regulations. In addition, to guarantee the right to a fair proceeding is to give enough opportunities for persons to defend themselves including a hearing, opportunities to challenge the evidence produced against them and finally to apply the regulations fairly and proportionally. To properly advise the institutions you need knowledge of the CAS case law regarding this subject and also access to previous decisions from the institutions to analyse proportionality issues. Sometimes this is complicated, especially in doping cases, where some panels are composed of persons that are not lawyers who usually do not pay attention to the details when conducting a legal procedure. In those cases, you will need to advise them on how to conduct a procedure that does not violate the rights of the accused party.

How are cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies being used by sports clubs and organisations?

Crypto assets are being used in sports as digital merchandise or memberships. Thus, NFTs are used normally as a collection item of clubs and tokens are used as some kind of membership. However, this new technology needs proper legal companionship because it can be a tool for other people conducting frauds or other illegal businesses. For example, crypto whales are individuals or entities that own large quantities of specific crypto assets to significantly influence market prices by trading significant amounts. Also, other felonies such as insider trading or money laundering. Hence a club needs due diligence before embarking on the use of this new technology.

For what reasons is the sports industry an increasingly attractive area of investment for private equity groups?

Private equity groups enjoy investing in sports tournaments or teams for diversification. For them, it is striking in sports, the long-term media rights deals, season ticket sales, and that sports organizations are unrelated to other assets. Furthermore, it is important to note that the scarcity of successful sports teams increases their valuation, making them more expensive to acquire.

How do you see your practice developing over the next five years?

This year 2023 we have taken a big step by changing our name to "Laurea" because of the new products and services we want to start offering. We desired a name that encompasses everything in terms of sports and entertainment. We needed to evolve from a legal firm to a sports consultancy, where we offer legal services and other services. Our idea is to create products in different areas for our clients and even to empower ourselves with our clients to also help them in their businesses.

Laurea will soon announce its consulting products in the areas of marketing, communications and finance.

The idea is that Laurea becomes a community by advising on the legal side but also generating business for all its clients.