Stepping Into a New Era of Legal Education

It’s impossible to talk about the $75 billion sneaker industry without talking about Portland, Oregon, the home of athletic titans like Nike, Columbia Sportswear, and the North American headquarters of Adidas. The city has its own Sneaker Week, celebrating advances in footwear innovation and culture. And basketball great Damian Lillard’s ninth signature sneaker pays homage to his former team, the Portland Trail Blazers, and the City of Roses.

Nic Mayne, adjunct law faculty member and attorney at Nixon PeabodyNic Mayne, an attorney in Nixon Peabody’s corporate practice group and a member of the firm’s Entertainment and Media and Sports and Stadium teams, is bringing his expertise in the sector to Lewis & Clark Law School. His new course, Contract Drafting: Sneaker Law, provides hands-on contract drafting experience through the lens of the sneaker industry, covering areas of law including entity formation, employment, intellectual property, licensing and influencer collaborations, and litigation.

“For me, as a transactional lawyer who primarily works in the entertainment and sports industries, the most useful law school class I took was a contract drafting seminar that was specific to sports contracts,” says Mayne, who earned his JD from Harvard Law School. “This is a difficult class that mirrors real transactional practice, going further than concepts and ideas around contracts.”

Mayne began teaching contract law at Lewis & Clark in 2023, drawing from his active and extensive corporate experience, including serving as lead counsel on multimillion-dollar deals in entertainment, sports, and influence-focused businesses. In recent years, he has been named an Oregon “Rising Star” by legal resource Super Lawyers as well as a “One to Watch” by the peer-reviewed publication Best Lawyers.

The 2020 release of Sneaker Law: All You Need to Know About the Sneaker Business, a textbook from Kenneth Anand and Jared Goldstein, was a moment of inspiration for Mayne. In his practice, he has found that clients increasingly expect lawyers to be able to apply their skills to specific industries. For law students, why not focus on the sneaker business in the city that made it the juggernaut it is today?

In the first week of the course, students look at the history of the sector and the process of setting up an official business entity, drafting documents of incorporation. To put the process into perspective, the class evaluates the articles of incorporation for companies like Nike, which began as Blue Ribbon Sports many decades back, digging through records from the Oregon Secretary of State.

“In high school, I spent most of my time researching streetwear and sneakers, so this course brought back a lot of memories for me,” says Bahar Tarighi JD ’26, who plans to practice transactional law. “Oftentimes, it’s easy to get lost in the books and not realize that what we do in law school has real-world implications. By taking a course where I have to take the lead and find resources, write contracts clauses, evaluate contracts, and watch contract law play out in real time, I’ll have a foundation to build off of in my first few years out of law school.”

The law school’s proximity to downtown Portland offers easy access to industry experts. Throughout the semester, Mayne plans to bring in guest speakers who can speak to their on-the-ground experience in the sneaker industry’s most relevant and influential companies. This fall, students will hear from senior employees at Nike, Fanatics, and Miller Nash, as well as from the talent agency Night Media, leveraging their insights to negotiate, draft, and close a mock influencer collaboration deal.

“For me, it’s important that this course be taught in Portland, where so many of these companies and iconic deals are based, and where we have access to the people who are actually doing the work,” says Mayne. “It’s such a rich and interesting industry, and Portland is at the heart of it.”

Contract Drafting: Sneaker Law Center for Business Law and Innovation