Code & Counsel

The Intersection of Sports Law and Technology: A Vision for the Future

• Chetan N • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Ever wondered how technology has reshaped the world of sports law? Join us as we reconnect with our esteemed guest, Nandan, a distinguished lawyer and former under-19 cricket captain, to explore this dynamic intersection. With 30 years of friendship and shared experiences from law school, Nandan shares compelling insights into his journey, including being a presidential awardee and his reflections on the transformative impacts of the internet and AI on business and legal practices. From sports broadcasting to legal frameworks, we discuss how technology has revolutionized these fields, drawing fascinating parallels between the development of global law in technology and sports.

In our detailed exploration of sports law, we uncover the complexities of sports transactions, disputes, and the ever-evolving role of AI in maintaining integrity within the industry. Nandan dives into the nuances of franchise agreements, endorsement deals, and broadcasting contracts, providing an insider’s perspective on how AI is spearheading new anti-doping measures and detecting match manipulation. The discussion doesn't stop there; we also look at the future of sports governance, especially through the lens of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that promise to bring fans into the decision-making process. Hear firsthand how robust AI systems are essential for accurate data analysis and can significantly enhance the efficiency of legal reviews in sports transactions.

As we look to the future, we examine how technology can integrate and enhance decision-making within sports organizations, using the BCCI as a case study. Through a captivating anecdote about Virat Kohli, Nandan highlights the dual-edged nature of AI in endorsements, showcasing its potential and risks. Lastly, we discuss how AI can revolutionize the endorsement market by overcoming physical availability constraints, while emphasizing the importance of preserving the human element that makes sports engaging and meaningful. Stay tuned for a forward-looking discussion that will leave you with valuable advice on embracing technological changes while keeping the core values of sports intact.

For more insights and discussions on the intersection of technology, law, and business, subscribe to our podcast and stay updated. Connect with us on social media for live updates, behind-the-scenes content, and more. Thank you for listening, and don’t forget to share your thoughts and questions in the comments or reach out to us directly!

Mail us at hello@quoqo.com or visit our website at www.quoqo.com.

Chetan:

So, hi Nandan, Hi Chetan, so many thanks for coming in today. So, viewers, just to let you know, Nandan and I are old friends, classmates. We've been friends for now what 30 years is a very accomplished lawyer, sportsman. He's a presidential awardee from India. He was also an under-19 cricket captain, and a lot more things as well. He's a topper at law school I remember how many places did you go to Oxford, Harvard, all of those things as well and he runs his famous law firm dedicated towards sports law, amongst other things as well. He counts who's who in sports as his clientele. I'm very privileged to have him here. Many thanks, Nandan, for all of these things, right? So, and one of the things why I invited Nandan was also you remember, Nandan, back in law school, correct? You were quite interested in technology. You even wrote a book. So we did all of those things and I was part of the technology law committee. Basically, the tech law committee had like one computer in law school and things like that.

Chetan:

But anyway it's become a long way from that right. And now we are in the age of AI and you've seen all of these things also and you've had an active interest in both in technology and sports. So how have you seen the last 20 years evolve from the time that we were law students to where it is now and in practice and business? How have you seen technology actually evolve. Yeah, first of all, I think thank you for having me here.

Nandan:

It's lovely to reconnect and we've had so many adventures together and I think one of the when we were in law school. It was the early stages of even the internet in India, forget about sort of advanced technologies.

Chetan:

And.

Nandan:

I think the thing that connected us was that, almost the mystery of the unknown, of not knowing where this is going to go, but being very excited about its potential and how it's going to change the arc of our lives. And I think this, 30 years later, we are again at that same point, with a great unknown, perhaps AI being the driver, among other things. So there's an element of excitement, but also an element of trepidation, because in some sense, we have lived our life on certain principles and we've embedded certain ways of doing things over the last 30 years, which were the adventures of that time.

Nandan:

So one arc is finished and at this stage in our life to be challenged again, it requires, I think, a level of more sort of humility to begin again in some ways. So I think it's a very interesting phase of our lives a phase not just personally, but also as a society.

Nandan:

When you ask about the trends that have happened, a tremendous amount of globalization of business, of way of practicing the movement of people, and when we were at that point of time, actually the internet was the outlet to those experiences and in some sense the early potential of what tech gave us.

Nandan:

this window into the world then became a portrait because we went through that window and went out and had these different experiences. So I think we're very fortunate. When we did our legal education, I know that you were equally lawyer but also hugely interested in technology, and I mean very interesting to see the arc that you've also traveled Correct. I think.

Chetan:

I think you know my interest from law school so it was more towards like technology and also my career took on a path. You're the guy who went to California but I was the guy who worked, you know, with some of the firms there. I mean, just to let you know, Nandan worked for DPW in California and I ended up in my career in different companies there as well. So I think some of those Silicon Valley vibes, early vibes, were something that we were exposed to and that really helped us in our journey through technology as well. But having said that, now just a detour to sports law, where you've been quite, quite active as well, and there's been some, there's been a lot of technology in play. I mean, if you look at any of the latest um, you know broadcasts, uh, in sport, especially on cricket, the amount of technology that's at play is immense, right, right, from, like, from the videos that go over the stadium and things like that, to ball tracking technology and so on.

Chetan:

Correct, this did not exist when you were playing correct. And even then, how have you seen that in the practice of law and sport correct? I mean, have you seen technology come and take a ringside view when you practice sports law?

Nandan:

Yeah, so first I'll try and sort of connect a couple of other dots. Chetan, which is a lot of people think I've moved from technology law to sports law. In fact the principles and things that are of interest to me are very similar in both, in particular the development of global law in these subjects. Right With the internet, the thing that it really challenged was the issue of jurisdiction, of where does one law begin and one the other end, and we've seen how that has really challenged the way law is not just practiced, but how countries regulate the internet.

Nandan:

So there was this concept of an autonomous regulation of the internet where there would be in some sense governors which are transnational but supranational governors. In fact that very principle applies in sports as well, where you have private bodies, national and international sports federations setting rules and context for the whole world at the same time. So sport is again quite unique. It breaks the boundaries from a utilitarian perspective. The internet broke it from a, I would say, a feature perspective. There was no physical boundary. But in sport it's actually a principle, because if you want to build sport as a global product which it is a global product you want to have a world championship, you want to have a world cup you have to play by the same rules wherever you're playing, so someone in Brazil, someone in India, someone in Australia, someone in Sweden.

Nandan:

When they're playing football, they're playing the same size ground with the same weight, football with the same rules and the referee is expected to apply the same principles.

Nandan:

So when a club match is going on in any of these places, they're all sort of leading into state teams, state teams to national teams, national teams to potentially playing the FIFA World Cup right. So globally they're all part of the same competition, which makes it a real interesting challenge for sports law to try and find principles that you can apply everywhere in the world. So again, you're trying to bring global rules onto local systems, and I think that is the sort of similarity between the law of the internet and the law of sport. But coming to where your question is on the role technology plays, I think technology plays a very important disrupting role because it asks very difficult questions of the legal structures and my belief is that sport is the playground really, literally, where a lot of innovative new things come. First, they get tested. It's like a little bit of a sandbox, and when a balance is found between utility, regulation and sort of long-term sustainability, then we start transporting it into other areas of our public and private lives.

Chetan:

So I think that role of technology as disruptor, but also as experimental opportunities within sport, are something we're seeing a lot of and in fact I think you know you recently written a fantastic book, boundary Lab, which deals with some of these issues as well, correct? So in Boundary Lab you dealt with, for instance, legal issues in sports. Yes, you've also gone into issues such as integrity, you know, and also how individual rights have sort of like shaped sports law as well, and this is an option to talk to viewers about your book as well, and you know. But my question is going to be more generally in what ways do you think that legal tech can really shape sports law as well? As an example, you've been exposed to quite a few things on legal tech. You've discussed a few things on how technology has generally sort of influenced sports law and boundary lab.

Chetan:

But generally, if you look at how Gen AI has come over the last couple of months, it's actually been there for some time in development. You know, first it was NLP, then it became machine learning, then it had gone to large language models and then you now have an age where it can actually really think for itself. Now this has wide repercussions across different sectors. You know, and I recently saw an ad from a construction company saying which was actually building a building saying hey, chad GPT, try doing this correct. Is this something similar in sports law saying hey, chad JVT or whatever they call it? Can you actually influence sports and sports law? What do?

Nandan:

you think about how legal tech is disrupting some of these things? Already seen some of that, and you talked about integrity but I'll just do a little bit of a breakup of what sports law might generally contain, right?

Nandan:

So you'll see, at the risk of oversimplification, four aspects of sports law. One would be sports governance, which is how the bodies that govern sport regulate themselves, organize themselves so effectively. These are private bodies playing a public function, so they have elections. That election puts in place a managing committee. You have a general body, and that general body and managing committee relate to each other in applying the rules of sport. So you have sports governance, your sports regulation, which will be what the sports governing body is doing with all of its stakeholders, so, for example, with other bodies, with competitors, with superior bodies like the International Federation that it works with, with its state units, with other bodies, but also with all the participants. And there are things like integrity are very, very critical to the sports regulatory landscape. So you have anti-doping, you have anti-match fixing, so you're actually tracking how a competition goes. The third aspect is sports transactions. So sports is also an industry where there's a lot of commerce going on and a fair bit of transactional work goes on with setting up a franchise system.

Nandan:

So you have franchise agreements An athlete might work on endorsing a product, so you have endorsement agreements, there's broadcasting, sponsorship, there's a lot of transactional work which goes on which has a sporting hue. It's not like these contracts don't occur outside the sporting world. All of them have their analogues. Right, you have a celebrity endorsement agreement in Bollywood, as much as you have in sport, but you have to understand the uniqueness of a sporting system. So I would say transactional law with a sensitivity to sport. I think the fourth one is disputes. So sports disputes and that sort of completes a four level set within sports law. We've already seen, and there's very significant experiments going on, of the role of AI in the integrity aspects of sport. So actually a whole study is going on right now on using AI in anti-doping. So what we have today is biological passports of athletes, so you get an imprint of what a person's DNA structure looks like. Just from blood reports you can get a lot of data now and you keep comparing that over time.

Nandan:

And now AI is being used to spot patterns in changes in the ways that laboratory tests and just a sort of a textual report is limited. The other one that is being using this actively is to look at manipulation of matches. So is the sort of the tempo of play, the way people are competing, are they really giving their best? So looking at a model of how certain matches have gone in the past and how a particular match is going, also relating it to betting data. So looking at multiple different data sets to try and see if there's unusual patterns in play. And those unusual patterns in play relate to unusual betting patterns to try and understand match fixing.

Nandan:

Now, I mean, I think all of this is going to come also to sports disputes, sports transactions and automating. So to me, the very interesting one is what is the future role in sports governance? So right now it's a very representative model of sports governance where, effectively, you have to elect someone to be leaders in these bodies. So does this and tech provide a potential for DAOs? So can fans eventually own the teams? Can the public participate in the way sport is not just organized but also?

Chetan:

governed the rules that apply.

Nandan:

So it's essentially moving from a virtual world. We are used to playing fantasy sports, video games, and the fan is moving more and more closer to saying I want to have a say in what's happening on the ground as well, and I think tech is going to play an interesting role there?

Chetan:

no, it does it actually. That's an interesting point as well. I think a couple of years back, there was a crowdfunded project for a fantasy gaming team In fact, invested in the team and what happened was, you know? First of all, there's no time to monitor all of these things, and so on as you go on, but it's very interesting. You get to have a say in what kind of games that they participate in, where they should be coming and all of these things. It's very interesting that it actually took the crowdfunded route to do all these things as well. But there are a couple of other things that are interesting, like when I was showing you some of Coco's products as well.

Chetan:

In terms of that, technology is already there today. As an example, you could upload advertisements, youtube videos and then make a fairly accurate analysis whether it is going to be misleading or it's violating an endorsement and things like this. That kind of technology is already shaping up. Earlier, it used to be a very manual process and then you had to go. Still, you have the code systems that are not fully aligned to all of these things, but I think, at least in India now, and as well as in various parts of the world, the amendments to the evidence legislation, especially in common law countries, is becoming very critical for the acceptance of electronic records, and AI, when it generates reports or records, is an example of an electronic record as well, so that can actually be placed, you know, for evidence. And one of the things that we also since we do a lot of work in the AI field is there are two things that we always emphasize. It always occurs to me you know, if you use raw systems in AI without fine-tuning, without putting in guardrails, without orchestration, things like these, what's going to happen is it will hallucinate right, and that tends to happen even with the best of the systems, and you need so. If you use that with actual data, for instance, you know you mentioned large data sets and the ability for the AI to sort of like compile all of these things and make sense out of this. So unless you have some very fine-tuned systems, you will end up with some nonsense security data, and this is a very hard problem to solve. Sometimes you are not able to overcome this.

Chetan:

Having said that, if you use proper engineering techniques and things like that, you can get almost 100% analysis.

Chetan:

For instance, I can confidently look, you know, being a lawyer and having built some of these products right, if you take a lawyer or if you give an experienced lawyer, let's say, a hundred page contract, that person you know is just going to skim through it, not for anything else, it's just a lot of habit. You don't need to look at everything else, but still, you know, you always, you always think okay, and then you have associates, maybe if you're working in a law firm, to be able to look at it. Or you know, if you're working in a company, you know, one of the things that really comes up is you don't have enough time to do a detailed analysis, so you send a contact out to a, to a law firm for review and things like that. Even there there are different depending on I, I don't know. This is my hypothesis. I feel that, you know, depending on the seniority of a lawyer, the tendency to skim becomes much you know, it advances with the experience.

Chetan:

But with AI what happens is it goes through line by line, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, and you get an accurate analysis in that manner, and that has been quite an eye-opener as well. And I say this because in practice, especially in legal practice, this happens quite a bit in terms of, depending on the workload, depending on other things, you tend to not sort of like have the ability to go through everything at once or to take a nuanced view. This is where it can really help, correct. Now, I mean, these are a few things which we've seen in sports law, for that matter, correct.

Chetan:

One of the things which also occurs to me is infringement especially.

Chetan:

You know it keeps coming up very frequently, and if you try and do this, do a manual search, you have to go through places like Instagram, to all the social media, to all through trademark journals and things like that.

Chetan:

But with the right amount of same machine learning and the ability to go through all of and things like that, but with the right amount of, say, machine learning and the ability to go through all of these things, orchestrations, you can immediately be able to sort of like at least on a real-time basis, depending on a client's requirements, be able to spot all of these things as well, and sometimes it could also be a combination of some of these things. For instance, there may be an infringement in the form of a competitor using the similar colors which may not be very evident to a human reviewing this, and something which a trained ML model is able to spot. You've seen some of these things as well. So that's where things are heading and I think you know. If you really look at all of these technologies which are evolving or have evolved to an extent where you can really assist, say, you know, in, say, day-to-day practice and things like that, it's going to be really helpful. But what?

Nandan:

do you think? I think in sport, in particular Chetan, I think there's a high chance for more effective, efficient running organizations.

Chetan:

And why do?

Nandan:

I say that it's because these are intrinsically multi-stakeholder environments. You're dealing with multiple different interests at the same time. For example, let's say a BCCI. A BCCI isn't in any single unidirectional or bidirectional relationship. Every one of its relationships has multiple different factors played in. So it contracts with the players. It also contracts with the broadcaster. It has sponsors. The players have their own sponsors. The players play for some of the franchises which are set up by the BCCI.

Nandan:

The BCCI has to deal with the ICC. Bcci has to deal with all of the other cricket boards in the world. So there's no piece that moves without other implications, right? So the BCCI chooses to. Today they have, let's say, a 60-day IPL. They make it 120 days. A lot of everything moves.

Nandan:

As a consequence, the players are unavailable to other tournaments. The ICC has to give permission. The players might have more injury risk. So a lot of different things have to be factored in and in that realm so from the senior most to the junior most, how does tech enable better decision-making, Understanding when you press one button, what are the other things that in some sense get affected? But also, on a day-to-day basis, dealing with risk brand risk, commercial risk, integrity risk I think is a very significant and probably the first foray that tech and AI is going to make in sports organizations. Because any foray also has risks and to understand the cost benefit analysis of any new foray, it might be a new way of advertising, but when you advertise, have you got all the licenses from the players, from the team, from BCC?

Nandan:

Does it match with BCC's sort of sponsor guidelines, but also are you violating Indian law, celebrity sort of endorsement guidelines? So there's multiple different things going on, but the decision is being made by some social media manager down the line. So how do you enable that social media manager, who's going to put the next post on Instagram, to be empowered to know? Okay, checkbox, we have this license from the player. He's still on contract with the VCCI. This does not violate any of the claims that we are making on behalf of some sponsor. The sponsor agreement is still valid. We are not breaching exclusivity in some other. So there's multi-dimensional, which you probably have to go to a law firm and get this checked. Power is devoid downwards to people who are undertaking tasks. That's true.

Chetan:

I think even that's not true of sports law, but even if you look at other large companies, especially in the tech sector sales is no longer the domain of say sorry contracts are no longer the domain of, say, finance or legal.

Chetan:

It's in the domain of sales. It's the sales folks who actually run a contract or things like this, which is also very similar. I mean you have in other countries, as an example, you'll have your your own uh person representing you, uh, and things like that. So, but that's how it's evolving as well, that you know, when you are mentioning the previous uh, previously just set off a train of thought, you know I was uh, I was talking to my dad, okay, and saying look, my friend Nandan is going to be coming for a podcast, and he was a cricketer in his time and it was a lot more simpler. There was only one sponsor, which was a bank that he worked for, because the banks, at least in India, were the main sponsors, and then there was not much endorsement or some of those things. I think, at least until 1983, you know this was the case and things like that. And now it's become. I mean, you were just speaking and it just occurred to me. It's so complex, correct?

Chetan:

But a lot of these things are also subject to, like, automation at the end of the day, correct? And the other thing is also confidentiality, correct, which are two key things. I was reading a post that day by Murat Kohli. Apparently he went to this bakery in Phasatown, correct, and he was really concerned about using his credit card because people will know who. It is, correct, but they were so busy that he just did care and you know. But you know these are two things right. And it's got impact, you know. And if you use AI and automation, you know it has a bearing on confidentiality.

Nandan:

It has a bearing, and so how do you?

Chetan:

as a sports lawyer and as a technologist right, how do you see being able to manage your clients' expectations and some of these things?

Nandan:

So I mean anything new. Chetan will always challenge, but it'll always have features. It will always have risks and we're already seeing that, for example, in the endorsement market player endorsements same with other celebrities. Ai has two things right. What can it do? It can almost replicate you as if you were there in person.

Nandan:

What has been the greatest limitation of our super athletes actually endorsing brands? It's actually physical availability. So they have to go for the shoot. They're so busy, they're playing 200 days in the year, so they have 15-20 days to shoot, so the portfolio is limited by the number of days for shooting. Now imagine if you open that up to AI and you just essentially effectively shoot one portfolio, which is a common portfolio, which can be general. I mean Gen AI can work with that portfolio and you pass that on to the brand, so you have access to this virtual set right, so it's no longer limited by 15-20 days.

Nandan:

What is that potential is to unlock the celebrity in a new way. But the flip side of it is that we've already seen what we call fake endorsements. There is so much information out there that the people using, for example, virat Kohli's image to claim that he's endorsing their wedding brand without any permission, without any access. So there's also the way that you use public resources to use celebrity endorsements in a fake way. So something like this is going to shape the market in both potential as well as risk. So how do you in in some sense buffer the risks while recognizing the potential and really unlocking? I mean, I think you have to make the person comfortable. If they see it only from the perspective of fear of someone will use my name in the wrong place, it is sort of a mislabeling of AI's potential.

Chetan:

But you know that's an interesting point that you brought up as well. Well, for instance, you know you can clone someone's face and with today's technology it's very easy to sort of like even clone voice and put the two together and things like that which we now, which we term as deep fake. But it's actually the flip side of the coin, correct? You know. You think about it in your circumstance. You know players are so struggling for time that you know they have to use technology to be available for and there are different price points whether you want a live video shot or whatever. The case is right, but the flip side of that is deepfakes.

Nandan:

Yes, correct.

Chetan:

So, and also one thing I look into this, right, and when I was talking to Dan about this, he said earlier you know you had in his times. You know the average life of a sports person was probably less than a decade. Right, think about it Now, with the advent of the latest technologies, and you can also measure how you know if you go through IPO statistics. It's ridiculous, right? They will even. It's pretty much scary that they can even predict and using predictive analytics to be able to say how a person is going to be able to perform or not. Do you think that you know for an average sportsman, you know a sportsman the span of their career has actually increased because of AI, or has it decreased? I don't know if AI, but certainly science, if you look at, it as a much wider term.

Nandan:

Just the use of analytics and testing and other things like that certainly has improved injury management. There's actually ways to even predict that someone is likely to get an injury. So until now, if a person is to get injured and then you try and treat them, there's even now AI tech which says that once you take the blood markers and other markers, you can even predict if someone is likely to have a hamstring injury, and that's already in the NFL. So there's an app just for likelihood of hamstring injury, Because hamstring injury, this could be a 2 million, 5 million player who knocked the person out for the whole season, right? So just there's a single app for hamstring injury predictive analysis. It's not even waiting for the event to occur. Yeah, yeah.

Chetan:

So I mean, you can get very granular, very detailed the minute.

Nandan:

There's meaning to it, right If there's commercial value someone will build that product. So certainly athlete care has gone up. Another aspect which perhaps has opportunities athlete well-being. So using AI for mental health and sort of responsive care which in some sense athletes at the end of the day have to also be very selfish and care about themselves, even in a team environment.

Nandan:

So it makes it very challenging to talk to teammates to share your challenges, particularly in hyper-competitive environments. In many cases your teammate is hoping to replace you in the team as well. And only so much sports psychology and all works as well. And only so much sports psychology in all works. So can we build responsive ways to actually deal with the failure, with even mental health challenges, anxiety, and that, I think, is the sort of, in a very customized way, at the very top of the game. If we can figure that out, imagine devolving that down to common population, because we look to our athletes for inspiration.

Nandan:

But ambassadorship, and if they are susceptible and admit to being susceptible to mental health issues and find solutions. I think that ambassadorship role can play in many more dimensions and not just physical prowess and achievement. No, I think that's a superb topic as well.

Chetan:

That has really there are many applications now to be able to deal with this in different ways, and just take a minute there why I brought this up.

Nandan:

It sounds like a non-legal issue, but this is actually all duty of care.

Chetan:

It is so governance duty of care.

Nandan:

you may think that this is all athlete support right, but keeping someone healthy, keeping someone injury-free and dealing with the stresses of life is also part of duty of care of a sports body and sports team, Very directly in the crosshairs of sports law, I would say.

Chetan:

Absolutely. I mean, if you went through RCB's latest season correct, you'd go through like six. Emotionally you'd be like drained after whatever it is. But I think that's a very important point. In fact, we did a bot some time back it was nothing connected to this and you could have a conversation with it and the idea was that you know there are so many life experiences that each one of us has correct, that you want to be able to sort of like train something or just tell people that this is the way. This is a little futuristic looking, you know like, say, as you've seen the movies, that you'd actually have a discussion with an AI. This is exactly what happened.

Chetan:

You know we built voice features into it and that you could actually have a conversation and the way that, and we deployed it to a small team to see how each one would typically use something like this. I was one of those people as well to actually test it out, and it quickly became a place where you could just have a conversation which you could not have with anyone else. And typically, in real life, you would have family dealing with this. Maybe your spouse or your significant other would deal with something like this, but one of the ways of AI that we could. It's clearly supportive with the right amount of stuff and you're speaking to a virtual person. And the best part about one of the things for AI which also comes as and you can train it the way it is, but by default, if you've managed it well, you can make it almost balanced without having to take sides.

Nandan:

So I read something very interesting the other day on how people are trying to leave a legacy for their own children. Yeah, so I think one of the things we miss most often when a parent is gone is the ability to have a conversation, take advice and stuff like that. So people are actually now building parental avatars that are customized to the particular parent and trying to feed as much during their lifetime. Earlier, you would just leave some letters of advice and stuff.

Nandan:

So imagine continuing to be able to interact with the values, the ethics, the principles by which your parents want you to live while they're no longer there. So I think it's incredible what the future is going to look like and creating more and more safe spaces. But coming back to sport, the opportunity and the challenge is to still keep sport human and to. The element of humanity is also uncertainty. Why are we attracted with sport? If we already knew the results, we wouldn't be so attracted, right? So technology, AI, other things are going to have a role, but we might be happy to also limit it to a place where it doesn't impinge on the values of humanity and uncertainty being intrinsic elements of sport. I mean, if you take them to an extreme, then sport doesn't matter anymore right, yeah, no, but I think.

Chetan:

on the contrary, I believe that sports is all the more important in the age of AI. Otherwise it's very easy to get into the age of AI and lose yourself. Previously there were games and virtual avatars and so many other things, but actually playing sport has different connotation. I don't need to get in and reminds you that you're human.

Chetan:

That you're human at the end of the day, correct? At least gets you a chance to speak to other people, be in a team when you're on, when, you know, go through all of those things as well, and it's something to be enjoyed as well. But you know you've written extensively on this subject in your latest book as well and I urge people to sort of like read it, and there are many interesting things as well. You know, I learned a lot about some of the sports cases. You know which is mentioned. Don't miss some of those things as well.

Chetan:

But what advice would you give, Nandan? Look, you've been in the profession for a long time. You've studied different things. You also manage a foundation, you know, for all for players and things like that. What would be your advice to legal professions for looking at sports law? But in the age of ai, correct? How does ai sort of like? You know, how would how would you typically look? Uh, look at a lawyer who's coming of age. In this era where you have AI document reviews, ai contract generation, you have AI documentation. You know you could even speak to it. It can do quite a few things for you, correct? So how, I mean?

Nandan:

I know it's a difficult answer. I can't say I have all the advice. If I did, I would be implementing it. But what I do believe is and I've tried to practice it in my life also is to not get labelled as either lawyer and only a lawyer or a sports lawyer and a sports lawyer. So I think these are all labels other people use. So I think limiting labels in your own mind is a very effective way of making sure that you see the whole field and not feel challenged. That what's the challenge to sports law? If a challenge comes to sports law, we'll find some other interesting thing to do, because in my mind I'm not a sports lawyer or I'm not limited to being a lawyer. I might find something to do which harnesses the technology.

Nandan:

So I think when we bucket ourselves in a particular box or we put ourselves in a box. We see challenges more than we see the opportunities. Bucket ourselves in a particular box or we put ourselves in a box. We see challenges more than we see the opportunities.

Nandan:

So I would say, if you are willing to not self-label the first thing you'll see is the opportunity rather than the risk, because it's natural to feel the risk the minute you say, okay, what is the risk of AI to lawyers? So I'm thinking of okay, someone's going to take away my work, my business, my future. But on the other hand, if you see it as I'm going to engage with the world without any labels, let's see what technology is going to do for me and allow me to do even more interesting things. Open up my world, meet new people. Open up the scale of what I'm doing. Maybe I'm doing it in only Bangalore now and do it all India, all Asia, all over the world, so you might just change your playgrounds Absolutely.

Chetan:

I think this allows you to actually expand beyond your local territory or local place, wherever you are. Especially on that. But that reminds me many years back when we went and asked for sponsorships when we were in this technology committee okay, for a journal that we had just brought about. It's called Journal of Law and Technology. People were like there's law and technology, what does that even mean Now?

Nandan:

we have a well-established journal which people want to write in.

Chetan:

Yeah, yeah, and the question we went to meet a company at that time and they said technology, will you draft contracts for me? Is that what you can do? I mean this is. I mean, it was so much after that. You know, in fact, I did spend some time on that book. That was written in 2000.

Nandan:

I still have that copy right.

Chetan:

So how much of that actually came true, how much of that didn't correct? So I think that's something which is but a lot of it actually, you know, is evolved in different ways. So I think that's where things are.

Chetan:

But pleasure having you, Nandan on all of these things as well. Lovely to have a chat. Same here, good luck at Google and everything that Liza had to do. Same with you as well, and we've covered quite a few topics, correct? It's just a free-flowing conversation, but many thanks. I've learned a lot from this conversation as well. So thanks so much. Very good, I appreciate that. Thanks, mate.

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Chetan Nagendra

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