Congratulations and best wishes to these IndyBar members on their career moves and accomplishments! Have something to share? Email Julie Armstrong to be featured.

 
Taft welcomes Elizabeth Little as an attorney in the firm's Bankruptcy and Restructuring group in the Indianapolis office. She provides integrated and strategic legal counsel on financial matters, including complex financial transactions, corporate debt restructurings, related litigation matters, and commercial contracts.

 
Chad Oswald has joined Dentons in Indianapolis as of counsel. A member of Dentons’ Commercial Litigation practice, Chad focuses his practice on fiduciary, commercial and real estate disputes. He also represents small businesses, shareholders, closely held business members and large corporations in complex commercial litigation.
 

ChatGPT is all anyone can seem to talk about these days, from grandmas to grade schoolers.  That is how you know when a technology has captured the popular zeitgeist. Now, if you haven’t used it yet, or are unfamiliar with it, ChatGPT is what is called a ‘generative AI’ tool, that is rendered in the form of a chatbot.

The nomination period has begun for the 2024 Boards of Directors for the Indianapolis Bar Association AND the Indianapolis Bar Foundation. There are also opportunities for service with the Association's Section and Division Executive Committees.  Volunteering with IndyBar is an invaluable opportunity to play a role in the future of our legal community.

LEAD1, the Minority Opportunities Athletic Association and the Black AD Alliance have turned their focus to hiring practices in college athletics. This effort builds on a LEAD1 white paper from January 2021 in which the organization proposed that search firms “serve as a ‘public trust’ and must be responsible for helping guarantee fairness, as well as integrity and inclusion in the hiring process.” The results of an NCAA survey from 2020-21 reflect that fewer than 20% of athletic director and head coaching jobs among the top Division I schools are held by people of color, while more than half of the athletes in the sports of football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball are students of color. The initiative will continue to review data on an annual basis with the goal of “increas[ing] transparency between people of color and decision-makers in the search process.” The article includes a link to the original white paper, “Actionable Recommendations to Create More Diverse Senior Leadership in NCAA Division I FBS College Sports.”

On the evening of October 26, 2022, the NCAA announced a new clarification of its guidelines surrounding monetization of student athletes’ name, image, and likeness (commonly referred to as NIL). While there is still a fair amount of  ambiguity in this fast-developing space, this clarification provides some much-needed guideposts for universities, collectives, and athletes alike. The guidelines signal that universities, their officials, and their boosters now have more ability to interact with and raise money for NIL collectives than previously indicated, and also provide a non-exhaustive list of dos and don’ts for universities to consider when interacting with collectives.

TikTok has already taken over as a dominant force in the social media world, but it has no plans of stopping there. TikTok now showing signs that it plans to compete with the likes of Apple and Spotify in the music industry by seeking a federal trademark registration in "TikTok Music."

Before Title IX of the Education Amendment was signed in 1972, there were roughly 310,000 women and girls playing sports in colleges and high schools throughout the nation. Fifty years later, thanks to the law, there are currently over three million women and girls playing interscholastic sports today, a number that continues to grow each year.

Recent technological developments have made topics like the metaverse, Web3, blockchain, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) commonplace. But nothing about these topics is common. They raise complex questions — technological, legal, financial, and cultural in nature — that cannot be easily answered. While the contours are under construction, the vision for these technologies, especially for the metaverse, is one that shouldn’t be ignored by brand owners.

The NCAA filed its brief in Johnson v. NCAA asking the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse a Pennsylvania district court’s finding that college athletes could be considered employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In a panel discussion, former Indiana University (IU) Athletic Director and current partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, Fred Glass, and in-house IU athletics attorney James Nussbaum discussed the potential implications of Title IX on NIL.