Richard L. Brand

San Francisco

Richard L. Brand is the managing partner of the ArentFox Schiff San Francisco office, the sports group leader at ArentFox Schiff and the lead West Coast real estate partner at ArentFox Schiff.. He’s been with the firm for 39 years and never had another job as an adult.

He’s considered a go-to advisor for naming rights agreements, media rights deals, sports M&A transactions, real estate and hospitality pacts and other sports and corporate transactions. At UC Berkeley School of Law, he leads seminars as an adjunct professor of sports law and has previously taught at Stanford and Georgetown.

“Growing up, I played sports and watched any and all sports,” said Brand, who played tennis and basketball before getting his JD cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. “Now, I’m in the business of sports.”

Brand operates at the nexus of sports, entertainment and the venues where athletes and artists perform. When we caught up with him in early August, he was headed to one of his major recent naming rights and sponsorship transaction projects, SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park, the $5 billion home of the Rams and Chargers that opened in 2020.

Illustrating SoFi’s multiuse versatility, Brand was taking his wife and daughters to a Taylor Swift concert. “I love the place,” he said. “I’m a bit of a stadium junkie. I’ll watch the games and the shows, but I’ll also walk around and look at the venue itself. A friend called the payback I get from visiting the deals I worked on ‘psychic income.’ There’s a real feeling of satisfaction and achievement from being involved in something so big and exciting.”

The complexity of stadium dealmaking was on full display in Brand’s sponsorship and promotional work at SoFi, named for the San Francisco-based personal finance company SoFi Technologies, Inc. Major sponsorship transactions include PepsiCo, American Airlines Group Inc., Samsung, Ball Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Constellation Brands, and Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, among others. He and his team negotiated dozens of sponsorship and procurement agreements, plus naming rights transactions.

“Sports transactions, especially venues, are a combination of corporate and real estate, both of which are in my wheelhouse,” Brand said.

—John Roemer