Michael Wall Discusses ACC’s Decision to Create In-House Counsel Role

Foley & Lardner LLP Of Counsel Michael Wall is quoted in the Sportico article, “Lawyering Up: ACC Joins Power 5 Peers with In-House Counsel Job,” discussing the new legal approach taken by the college athletics conference to hire a full-time executive staff member to provide comprehensive oversight of legal affairs.

Wall said, “It is a highly volatile, fluid state of affairs, and if you don’t have the general counsel being the traffic cop and advising executives on what course they should take, there is a vacuum.”

He explained that typically an in-house lawyer would not helm a conference’s legal defense but instead serve to coordinate when and which outside counsel was appropriate to hire. In this way and many others, Wall noted, having a lawyer on staff can be a significant cost-saver.