Why sports organizations need modern document management

Sports is a billion-dollar industry with a vast array of legal challenges. From media rights and player contracts to antitrust concerns and intellectual property disputes, lawyers in sports organizations can face complex and high-stakes issues.

For example, in 2021, the NFL finalized an 11-year media rights agreement that nearly doubled its media revenue to over $10 billion per season. The NBA recently made a $76 billion broadcast deal that almost tripled its prior $24 billion TV agreement. Both deals highlight the importance of professional sports lawyers developing a thorough understanding of collective bargaining, media rights agreements, and other contractual issues such as sponsorships and merchandising.

While major league media deals don’t occur every day, the development of the legal expertise required to win them does. Over time, sports lawyers’ daily work activities create a vast store of organizational knowledge. Each document and email they work with preserves their hard-won insights, legal considerations, and industry know-how. This wisdom proves highly valuable when attorneys later use it to guide their decision-making and determine how best to deploy winning strategies.

However, even the largest intellectual storehouse is useless if lawyers cannot easily access relevant information quickly. Traditional document storage systems create information gaps and silos that severely limit their ability to respond in a timely manner in fast-moving situations. Manual workflows and outdated technologies work as roadblocks preventing attorneys from accessing knowledge. When billions of dollars could hang in the balance, sports organizations need the reliability and security of a modern document management system (DMS) that connects lawyers to the information they need the moment they need it.

Knowledge gaps and silos hinder productivity

Legal teams in sports organizations often work on projects that involve as many or more stakeholders as players in sports games. Attorneys must bring league partners, venue managers, vendors, sponsors, merchandisers, players, PR, agents, media representatives, and others together to draft and review contract terms, analyze market trends, set strategies, and respond to game-changing events. Related emails contain important context to preserve the story behind each document they touch.

However, without a modern document management system to properly identify, store, and manage them, email threads with crucial discussions and decisions get lost in the digital shuffle. Lawyers must manually search through numerous inboxes and shared folders, guessing at the relationships among them.

Documents stored haphazardly across multiple applications, shared networks, and personal devices isolate the most up-to-date knowledge. Uncertainties about whether documents are outdated or relevant to a particular situation make them difficult to trust. Manually transferring data between applications and recreating knowledge assets from scratch consume valuable time, delaying contract negotiations and response times. 

Relying on legacy systems and manual workflows also makes sports organizations vulnerable to cyberattacks. Outdated practices can expose them to significant security risks. Given the high-value and confidential nature of the information sports organizations manage, it makes sense to invest in a DMS that enables world-class document security, governance, and retention capabilities.

Sports organizations can only tap into the value of their legal team’s accumulated knowledge when legal professionals can easily access the documents and emails the instant they need them and share their knowledge securely.

A reimagined solution for modern sports organizations

Managing multiple complex projects efficiently requires a modern DMS that stores documents and emails in one location. A unified document access, management, and collaboration platform enables legal teams to work faster, make fewer errors, and protect their knowledge assets with state-of-the-art security.

Legal teams of all sizes in sports organizations are bringing documents and emails into a single DMS where AI and automation can simplify workflows and project management. A cloud DMS offers several significant benefits, including:

Easy-to-use design

Intuitive and user-centric design minimizes the learning curve. A familiar interface helps attorneys quickly grow proficient in getting the most out of advanced features and improving productivity.

Secure AI features boost productivity

Work smarter to meet tight deadlines and excel under pressure with secure AI features that:

• Boost knowledge management: Access existing knowledge faster with AI-powered recommendations for relevant documents or emails based on your current task. Maximize the value of past projects by ensuring their accessibility and reuse. And make more well-rounded decisions that consider all the available data and knowledge.
• Automate routine tasks: Automate mundane tasks with an AI-powered assistant that automatically files emails and attachments in the proper folder. Save time and reduce errors with consistent workflows. Refine workflows to eliminate tedious clicks and frustrating bottlenecks. 
• Summarize and enrich documents: AI-generated document summaries provide immediate answers when time is of the essence. Auto-compare documents and ask follow-up questions to save hours as AI instantly uncovers meaningful information and insights.
• Search intelligently: Intelligent search capabilities enable fast and comprehensive information gathering. In seconds, find and retrieve the correct information and relevant documents. Access, re-use, and share knowledge across the organization with a search function that learns from how you work.

Flawless integrations close knowledge gaps

Securely connect your DMS to other applications to automate more complex tasks, refine workflows, and extend functionality. Direct integrations with existing IT systems break down information silos and close knowledge gaps while giving attorneys the comfort of working with familiar tools, even with a new DMS. For example, a DMS that integrates with Outlook automatically captures and saves emails, chats, and attachments with all other relevant documents. As it does, it incorporates identification and categorization processes that speed up retrieval and access. Integrations with Microsoft 365 and other applications enable these tools and a modern DMS to automatically exchange information so sports lawyers can focus on the big picture rather than data entry.

Secure remote access supports efficient teamwork

Securely access documents from any device and any location at any time. Share and edit documents securely with remote collaborators to speed communications and decision-making. Projects are organized with an intuitive structure that keeps everyone in the loop. Robust security features such as encryption, authentication, and access controls protect sensitive data, even if a device is lost or compromised.

Enable effortless collaboration with co-authoring

Transform individual expertise into a shared resource by enabling collaborators to work on documents simultaneously. Enable real-time co-authoring and editing while accounting for appropriate access and permissions. Version control ensures everyone finds the most recent information to complete high-value deals faster without sacrificing accuracy. The system retains prior versions of documents for audit purposes, so teams can always refer to past work or see edits to it.

iManage: The sports lawyer’s DMS for compliance

iManage can also help simplify compliance in today’s rapidly changing regulatory landscape. iManage Records Manager offers a central interface for managing both physical and electronic records, enabling you to apply retention policies across multiple repositories and:

• Enforce good governance practices, including the automated, defensible disposition of content to comply with league rules, corporate policies, and industry regulations.
• Ensure existing document and records management practices align with continually evolving regulations and policies.
• Significantly minimize the risk of data exposure and reduce overall storage costs.

As the industry leader in protecting sensitive and confidential content, the iManage platform leverages operational services and infrastructure built on Microsoft Azure to embed security into the lifecycle of every workflow. Its state-of-the-art Zero Trust information architecture ensures all data remains protected and secured. Meet data privacy and security regulations and ensure transparency with comprehensive governance and security features that have demonstrably protected all types of assets in the past.

Preserve more knowledge, win more record-breaking deals, and stay ahead of the competition with a cloud-native DMS built from the ground up to handle the demands of law departments in sports organizations, whether you have five attorneys or 500. 

In addition to thousands of the largest organizations and law firms across the globe, top-tier sports organizations Kroenke Sports, MSG Entertainment, Minnesota Timberwolves, NASCAR, Singapore Sports Hub, and more trust iManage for their modern document management needs. Our extensive experience with large-scale deployments means we can offer the most cost-effective solution for any in-house legal department. Legal teams with fewer than ten lawyers also find that iManage provides the best value in the market.

As the company dedicated to Making Knowledge Work™, we’re here to help lawyers in sports organizations achieve their full potential and develop a championship-caliber legal department.

Learn more about what iManage can do for your legal team today.