Layth Gafoor, a accomplice at Lucentem Sports activities & Leisure Legislation, is the President of the Sports activities Legal professionals Affiliation, coming into the second 12 months of his two-year time period.
At Lucentem, he advises on authorized and enterprise issues inside the sports activities and leisure industries. Particularly, Gafoor serves as counsel and agent to quite a lot of sporting organizations, groups, elite skilled athletes and artists in addition to shoppers who’re in music, movie and tv. He’s a coveted authorized commentator and adviser to a few of as we speak’s main organizations and known as upon to cowl all kinds of nationwide and worldwide sports activities and leisure tales and analyze them from a Canadian authorized framework.
As an skilled in disaster administration, Gafoor additionally works as a world speaker delivering his information to audiences worldwide. He was born and raised in Toronto and participates in numerous professional bono initiatives within the metropolis, together with the LAWS program on the College of Toronto.
For this inaugural e-newsletter, we sought out Gafoor for our month-to-month interview, which follows beneath.
Query: How did you get your begin in sports activities regulation?
Reply: I began my authorized profession on the company and litigation aspect. Nevertheless, having participated in athletics all through my life, I had many buddies and colleagues who had been engaged in varied sports activities on the high-performance stage. Finally, I made a decision to alter the route of my apply in order that I could possibly be precious in aiding my athlete buddies with defending a few of their pursuits. I used to be lucky sufficient to share the identical alma mater (i.e., Osgoode Corridor Legislation Faculty in Toronto) as one in all our previous presidents, Gord Kirk, who inspired me to turn into a member of the SLA, and I instantly knew it was the sports activities regulation group for me.
Q: Why did you resolve to pursue a management function in SLA?
A: I simply wished to be useful to the group, and so I reached out to a number of the board members on the time, searching for recommendation on how I may doubtlessly be of help with a number of the precedence tasks inside the affiliation. That gave me an important alternative to work with most of the leaders on the board – Nona Lee, Matt Mitten, Bobby Hacker and Allison Wealthy, simply to call a couple of. Because it turned out, we had been actually at a crossroads as a company by way of what we noticed as the way forward for the affiliation and our need to turn into the preeminent international sports activities regulation affiliation. This led me to be part of a strategic planning committee that actually delved deeply in inspecting suggestions from our membership and permitting that to put the muse for our strategic plan for the affiliation.
Q: How important is it that you just carry a world perspective and worldwide illustration to SLA?
A: I feel the timing of it is necessary. All the main sports activities leagues and types perceive the significance of serving a world viewers, as they domesticate their respective international photos. I do consider lots of my colleagues on the board share these identical targets for the affiliation. I feel it’s symbolic that I’m from Canada, however it’s merely a coming into fruition of the board’s long-contemplated imaginative and prescient that I’m honored to help in supporting the board.
Q: What are your targets for the second 12 months of your time period?
A: I actually see my mandate as president as being a continuation of the unimaginable work of my predecessors, and each present and previous board members. There are actually three main strategic targets that I’ll proceed to push ahead and construct on and they’re as follows: (1) to extend the illustration and influence of our youthful members by way of our NextGen committee; (2) to construct and strengthen a second platform, which is our fall symposium, as a method of complementing our industry-leading annual convention; and (3) to reimagine our annual convention in artistic ways in which takes our industry-leading convention to the following stage, in a means that responds to and resonates with the affiliation’s ever-evolving membership.
