Written by Lauryn Wang
Kevin Massoudi and Lisa Horwitz joined JSEL from Los Angeles, California, providing insight into their roles as Senior Managing Counsel and Associate General Counsel, respectively, at LA28. Kevin and Lisa joined LA28 in different stages of their legal careers but both emphasized the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a measurable impact on the City of Los Angeles.
When asked about their day-to-day at LA28, Kevin shared that the legal team has grown to 30 people and analogized the culture to a startup. Kevin and Lisa said that a common aphorism at LA28 is that they are working to “build a plane once it’s in the air.” Lisa similarly compared the experience of working at LA28 to coordinating a political campaign with regards to deadline pressures and big deliverables.
Interestingly, LA28 is a private non-profit, unaffiliated with the City of Los Angeles in a public capacity. Kevin explained that historically, other host cities benefit from ministries of sports, organizing committees, departments, or agencies to help plan the Games. LA28 is uniquely positioned to work with IOC, USOPC, and the City of Los Angeles as a result.
Lisa also detailed how she works very closely with NBC, the official broadcaster of the Games. Lisa said she writes a “dizzying amount of contracts” per day, navigating sponsorship agreements, and especially, the first naming rights agreement in Olympic history.
Lisa shared that a few sponsorship agreements have intersected with LA28’s vision for a public transportation-friendly Games. LA28 has partnered with Hyland Fleets, an electric school bus company, to help transport its workforce to various venues. It also has an agreement with Uber to coordinate group rides and prevent overflow of parking lots. Additionally, LA28 is working hand-in-hand with LA Metro and LA Department of Transportation, and a host of other local transit agencies.
Kevin has also embraced a variety of responsibilities in different functional areas, offering legal perspectives on the business and operational side. After spending six years at Pillsbury before joining LA28, Kevin said that transitioning from being on teams and matters with a plethora of attorneys at each stage to teams with mostly business folks required translating legal concepts to individuals with different backgrounds and coordinating business operational alignment.
Lisa emphasized that “learning how to learn new things” when she was a law student has served her incredibly throughout her career. Lisa’s journey, from trial lawyer to transactional attorney to in-house counsel, is an example of how students’ future careers will feature many chapters. But at each stage, taking the initiative and learning to embrace learning moments have been common denominators as she approaches each new role.
Kevin and Lisa have been consistently pushing the envelope at LA28, demonstrating their adaptability as they “reinvent the wheel every time” a new matter crops up. Despite the Games being over 130 years old, there is no checklist or blueprint passed down from host city to host city. Kevin compared the Paris Games and the LA games as “apples to hamburgers,” as LA28 seeks to ensure the event makes sense in the local context.
The 2028 Games will be groundbreaking for the city of Los Angeles for a multitude of reasons, but particularly for the Paralympic community. For the first time, LA will be hosting the Paralympics. Lisa shared that the commercial side of LA28 has fully integrated the Paralympics with the Olympics, and LA28 similarly has the right to sell paralympic broadcast rights.
While LA28 is focused on a sustainable footprint particularly with venues, Kevin provided insight into one important lasting legacy of the Games: investment in youth sports. LA28 has made the single largest investment in youth sports in U.S. history, totaling 160 million dollars cumulatively to develop and expand youth sports, including traditional sports and adaptive sports.
Ultimately, JSEL’s conversation with LA28 counsel was a unique window into the day-to-day lives of in-house counsel working towards a truly exceptional goal on a global stage.
