David Donovan | Washington Redskins General Counsel

On a recent Sunday evening, with the lights of an empty stadium still illuminating the dark autumn sky, David Donovan sat perched in his usual post-game spot, sharing a skybox with Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder. The game, now a distant memory for some, was still top of mind for Donovan, and one thing was still clear: for members of a football team, including their in-house lawyers, the job gets harder further into the calendar year.

Earlier that night, the Skins hosted the Cowboys in a crucial game: a win and the Redskins could virtually assure Dallas would be home for the playoffs. But the team’s bitter rival won the pivotal game 14-10, allowing the Cowboys to pull even in the standings, preventing the Skins from taking a big step toward making the playoffs. While the loss was deflating for the fans, Donovan says it’s just as painful for those working for the team, if not more so.

“The whole atmosphere turns so much on whether we’re winning or losing,” says Donovan. “It affects every aspect of the business. And even if it didn’t, coming to work on a Monday morning after a win is a world apart from coming in after a 3 am flight home from Dallas after a loss.”

As general counsel of the Washington Redskins, Donovan is totally invested in not only helping billionaire owner Daniel Snyder navigate the legal issues facing his organization, but also in the wins and losses that define an organization.

“It’s been a lot of fun,” says Donovan, who works with one other in-house lawyer. “It’s very, very different from being a litigator in a big law firm and working on a small handful of different matters for months or years at a time. Working for a pro sports team means constantly combining work and play and being involved in every facet of the business, usually juggling dozens of different issues every week, with few matters extending beyond a month or two. And, of course, you aren’t keeping track of your time at all, much less in tenths of an hour.”

Donovan joined the Redskins after working for a few years as outside counsel for Snyder and the team, which continued a recent run of WilmerHale lawyers who have moved from the conference room to the sports arena. Richard Cass, the former head of WilmerHale’s corporate practice, helped engineer a buyout for Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti in 2004 and then accepted Bisciotti’s offer to become team president. And in 2005 WilmerHale corporate lawyer Alec Scheiner became general counsel of the Dallas Cowboys.

Tapping into the NFL wasn’t easy. WilmerHale gained entrée into the league through its corporate practice, beginning with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, nearly two decades ago. From there, WilmerHale’s client list has grown to include the Redskins, the Charlotte Hornets (now the New Orleans Hornets) and the Indianapolis Colts.

Donovan’s initial involvement with the Redskins came as a result of litigation against the estate of former owner Jack Kent Cooke, who WilmerHale had represented in connection with the auction sale of the team to New York financier Howard Milstein. Milstein sued the estate after he withdrew his bid to buy the team, claiming that the estate and certain executors had worked behind the scenes to undermine his offer. Donovan and another former WilmerHale partner, P.J. Mode, represented the estate and the executors, who won the case in trial court and on appeal. After Milstein lost that lawsuit, he sued Snyder, who by that time owned the Redskins. Milstein claimed that if the Cooke estate were not responsible for his inability to get NFL approval for his bid to buy the team, then Snyder was. Snyder retained Donovan to represent him and, after months of litigation, an independent arbitrator ruled in Snyder’s favor.

From there, Donovan continued as Snyder’s chief outside counsel until 2005 when he was asked to leave his practice, which also included managing WilmerHale’s Northern Virginia office, to join the Skins. Donovan, who had been a founding member of the office (along with corporate partner Tom White and litigation partners Ted Killory and Steven Cherry), found the offer too tempting. On the date of his twentieth anniversary with WilmerHale, Donovan made the jump to the NFL.

In his first away game in his new role with the team, Donovan found himself in the middle of the visiting owner’s box at Texas Stadium as the team made a 13-point come-from-behind win in the final minutes against the Dallas Cowboys. As the two men enjoyed the rush of adrenaline that accompanies a big win, Snyder grabbed Donovan by his jacket and, as reported by The American Lawyer, bellowed rhetorically, “This beats asbestos lawsuits, doesn’t it?”

In addition to quickly learning the joy of winning football games as a member of the team, Donovan also found that being a GC meant being versed in a laundry list of legal issues. Like many lawyers who have gone in-house to serve, Donovan says he gets the most pleasure from dividing his focus across a number of areas. “I can’t think of just about anything that we don’t do. You name it, and we have our hands in it,” he says.

That includes working on employment issues and collective bargaining; revenue sharing; insurance; marketing sponsorships; suite sales; leasing; corporate governance; trademark and copyright licensing and protection; player conduct; coach contracts; security; media rights; press relations; zoning; counterfeiting; team travel; and compliance with the myriad of league rules and policies governing everything from game operations and alcohol sales to club debt levels.

On some matters, the Redskins outsource the legal work to law firms, like when Donovan tapped WilmerHale partners Justin Ochs and Jack Goodman over the past few years to help one of Snyder’s companies (of which Donovan is also the general counsel) acquire radio stations for a sports radio network in Washington DC and Richmond and Norfolk, Va.

Most recently, Donovan has been focused on a ruling handed down from a Maryland federal judge in October addressing the accommodations sports stadiums must provide for the hearing impaired. That decision did little more than reaffirm that what the Redskins had already been doing voluntarily since 2006 was sufficient to comply with the law. The ruling also is the first of its kind in the country, and could lead to additional lawsuits at other sporting venues. "We already were captioning every word spoken over the public address system in the stadium," Donovan says. "The only thing that the decision requires that we were not already doing was providing lyrics to songs the cheerleaders dance to in their routines. There wasn't anything else in this decision that we didn’t already do."

But what’s most important for the team is winning. Often. With a quarter of the season remaining, Washington is on the cusp of earning another playoff spot. No matter the outcome, for Donovan, the season never ends.