Niche Players To be a jack of all trades or a master of one? Becoming an expert in a niche area has paid off for these lawyers.
Paul Horvath — sports law There are plenty of generalist lawyers who can deal with individual sports cases, says Paul Horvath, but far fewer who know the sports industry well enough to grasp the politics surrounding a case, as well as the law. “It’s not like employment law,” Mr Horvath says. “The sports industry is relatively small and individual sports are even smaller, so you have to be careful how you go about a legal issue – this is about people’s careers and you can’t just go charging in saying ‘this is what the law says’.
You can win the battle and lose the war.” A former criminal lawyer with Maurice Blackburn, Mr Horvath says he was looking for a new direction when he came across a sports law course at the University of Melbourne. With zero connections in the sports industry he decided to write each of his six 10,000-word papers on topics that would assist sporting organisations, including one on best governance practices for sporting organisations, and one for the AFL Players Association on the AFL anti-doping code.
