A front-office executive moving from one professional sports organization to another, a base salary the market supported, and a non-compete clause that would have kept him out of the league for three years after termination. We rebuilt the contract around the offer.
The executive had received a verbal offer to leave his current organization for a senior role with a new team. The verbal terms were fair. Base salary, performance bonus structure, relocation support, and a clean start date. The draft agreement that followed was not those terms.
The document contained a three-year post-termination non-compete covering every team in the league plus adjacent leagues in the same sport, a broad intellectual property assignment that would have captured any side project he had worked on for the past five years, a unilateral right for the team to restructure his compensation at any time for organizational reasons, and a change-of-control provision that would have given a future owner a no-cost termination right.
He had fourteen days to sign or the offer would be rescinded.
We redlined the agreement against the verbal offer within 72 hours. We narrowed the non-compete to a one-year window, limited to direct competitors for the same role, and added a paid-garden-leave provision so any restriction had to be paid. We carved pre-existing intellectual property out of the assignment and added a schedule so both parties had clarity on what was his going in. We replaced the unilateral compensation-restructuring clause with a mutual-consent standard, and redrafted the change-of-control provision so a future owner would trigger either continued employment on existing terms or a severance payment, not a termination option.
We coordinated with his personal financial advisor on the tax and deferred-compensation treatment of the bonus structure, and reviewed the relocation package for proper grossing-up. The agreement signed within the 14-day window, with every material change preserved.
"I thought I was signing the offer I accepted. Brandon showed me I was not."
— Executive
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