CompetitionClay O’Neal (J.D. ’14) and Andrew Mase (J.D. ’14) were overall winners of the Third Annual National Sports Law Negotiation Competition (NSLNC), which took place on September 20-22, 2013 at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego.

According to Professor and Director of the Competitions and Alternative Dispute Resolution Program Nancy Schultz, “They were in first place going into the final round, with the only perfect score in the competition.”

“Although Andrew and I work really well together and are great communicators, we really owe our success to coaching from Nancy Schultz and David Dowling. Their work with the teams improves our skills exponentially,” O’Neal said.

Chapman Law outperformed the other thirty-five teams from 25 different law schools, including second place winner UC Hastings, third place winner Southern Methodist, fourth place winner Fordham, UCLA, St. John’s, Creighton, Pepperdine, UC Davis, and Marquette.

Paul Deese (J.D. ’14) and Stephen Tanizaki (J.D. ’14) finished in seventh place, but the team was only a half of one point away from a tie for fourth place.

The competition takes place in conjunction with the Sports Law Conference, which includes tickets to a San Diego Padres v. Los Angeles Dodgers game and meeting with the Padres General Counsel Erik Greupner. The competition affords students the opportunity to engage in an array of sports law areas, including contract and salary negotiations, trading players, endorsements, intellectual property, and athletes’ family and personal matters.

According to NSLNC Director Jeremy M. Evans, Esq., “Our mission is to provide the sports profession with a body of able and ready legal minds, through the negotiation and training of law students with the use of real-life issues affecting athletes, sports franchises, teams, like businesses and entities.”