Navigating Success in the Sports & Entertainment Industry
The worlds of sports and entertainment are fast-moving, high-stakes industries where success is never guaranteed. Athletes, performers, teams, leagues, and organisations operate in a fiercely competitive and highly publicised environment where digital transformation is unlocking new opportunities—but also introducing new risks.
At HKA, we help clients manage risks, disputes, and uncertainty on complex and challenging sports and entertainment contracts and projects. With deep industry expertise, we provide strategic support to mitigate risks, protect reputations, and drive long-term success.
The Digital Revolution: Opportunities & Challenges
Technology is reshaping the sports and entertainment industries. Digital platforms, streaming services, augmented and virtual reality, and data-driven insights are revolutionising fan engagement and revenue generation. However, this rapid transformation brings new challenges:
Companies must embrace innovation while protecting their legal and commercial interests. Our team provides tailored strategies to help clients navigate these complexities confidently.
Legal disputes in sports and entertainment can escalate quickly, attracting intense media attention and carrying significant financial and reputational consequences. In sports, legal battles often extend beyond individual disputes—they shape the rights and obligations of leagues, teams, players, agents, and governing bodies. Our expertise ensures that clients can navigate these challenges efficiently while maintaining their competitive edge.
Whether you’re an athlete, entertainer, rights holder, or corporate stakeholder, we provide the people with the expertise needed to navigate industry challenges and to help safeguard your interests.
HKA’s multidisciplinary sports and entertainment experts, consultants, and advisors have profound and pertinent experience helping clients manage risks and resolve disputes—from investigating corruption in international football to cost and delay claims in stadium construction and valuing damages due to copyright infringement or breaches of licensing agreements.
Our people are problem-solvers—forensic accountants and investigators, commercial damage assessors, intellectual property and patent damages experts, and other specialists—with an enviable track record of working on some of the most complex and high-profile sports and entertainment cases. We have carried out investigations and testified before courts, arbitration tribunals, regulatory boards, and various international forums.
At every stage of the dispute resolution cycle, we can support you – with early strategic advice, robust calculations of loss, in settlement negotiations or, depending on our role, sports and entertainment expert witness testimony. Our sports and entertainment experts assess the value of economic damages across a wide range of engagements and subjects – including losses alleged in breach of contract claims and post-acquisition disputes or contentious valuations in shareholder or joint venture disputes.
Our intellectual property experts offer specialised dispute services across the spectrum of IP practice. These services range from valuing intangible assets, quantifying damages, including lost profits and reasonable royalties, preparing accounts of the infringer’s profits, assisting with technology transfers and providing expert witness testimony.
HKA’s Digital Forensics and Data Solutions professionals specialise in all aspects of digital data, including its collection, analysis, investigation, discovery, tracing, and governance. Our team specialises in delivering expert insights into the expansive realm of digital evidence. We support clients in navigating the complexities of digital investigations, including eDiscovery, advanced analytics, high-tech crime, blockchain forensics and cybersecurity.
HKA support is often incisive in cases of corporate fraud, regulatory investigations, white-collar crime, and bankruptcy. We can mobilise international teams and operate across jurisdictions, detecting accounting anomalies, tracing funds and assets, liaising with regulators, and helping you navigate even the most complex cases.
Counsel and their clients can draw on an HKA spectrum of specialists for expert technical reports and witness services. They are authorities in fields as diverse as fire engineering, IT and data technology, building structures, and environmental consultancy, including climate performance, regulatory compliance, and ecology.
Given the breadth of our expertise, we are also able to mobilise teams to deliver multiple services in a way that is seamless and more cost-effective for our clients. Depending on the nature of the assignment, this may involve colleagues specialising in Disruption & Delay Analysis, Engineering and Construction Quantum, Claims Management or Advisory services on asset strategy and capital project controls.
The breadth and depth of HKA expertise is unmatched – and trusted by lawyers and clients worldwide.
Whatever your dispute, commercial or regulatory challenge, we can provide an expert or team with relevant experience and authority for most briefs.
