A Minnesota Law clinic is a leader in representing college athletes

University of Minnesota Law School 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 and Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) Clinic made its debut. The clinic, a partnership between the Law School and Fredrikson & Byron, launched in 2022 and has grown each year since.

Chris Pham, a shareholder at Fredrikson & Byron law firm, 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.

“We were seeking to explore this interest in sports and give it a venue for students,” 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.”

Real cases. Real clients.

Minnesota Law has long offered students the opportunity to earn a first-rate clinical education working on real cases with real clients through its many law clinics.

Students in the Sports and NIL Clinic are 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, each clinic session this year includes a current-event segment to respond to the changing landscape.

But perhaps most popular with students are the clinic’s field trips. Those have included attending a University of Minnesota Gopher women’s basketball game (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.

Meeting a growing demand

The popularity of college and professional sports and strong interest in NIL as an emerging area of the law is driving an increase in clinic enrollment, and a number of student-athletes have already become repeat clinic clients, including Gopher women’s hockey forward Audrey Wethington (BS ’23, MBS ’25). Wethington, who plans to 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. “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.”

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.

Pham says that while the space is changing quickly, Minnesota Law is adapting to meet the demand.

Pham and Sharma both have heard from representatives of other law schools and 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.”

This story is adapted from Minnesota Law Magazine