ESG Law

Entertainment Sports
and Gaming Law

Attorney

Krista Hiner

Partner

Krista focuses her practice on providing daily strategic counsel and transactional support to esports, video game, digital media, and professional athlete clients. On any given day, this means handling commercial contracts, employment law matters, intellectual property transactions, negotiating with leagues on behalf of teams or talent, supporting games publishing and marketing, and general start-up support.

She loves getting dialed-in to the ongoing needs and individual goals of her clients, knowing that clients receive the best legal support when their attorney has an intimate understanding of their specific business goals and values beyond what’s written down in a deal memo. In her practice, Krista emphasizes the need to balance legal considerations against each client’s practical, business considerations and other non-legal concerns.

Krista handles licensing and merchandising agreement for collaborations with some of the most popular brands in the world, including Marvel, Star Wars, The Smurfs, and Naruto, and Deadmau5 X Cateyed Boy. She regularly negotiates industry-leading sponsorship, media distribution, and talent agreements, and supports games publishers and game developers behind acclaimed indie games and highly anticipated sequels.

Her work on behalf of esports teams has been integral to the negotiation of charter and operational documents for the first franchise-style esports leagues including the League of Legends Championship Series, League of Legends European Championship, Overwatch League, and Call of Duty League. She also handles work on behalf of top-ranked professional pickleball players across the table from the leading professional leagues Major League Pickleball and the Professional Pickleball Association.

In addition, she regularly counsels clients on their practices surrounding online services whereby they interact with fans and customers, an area of business where privacy law, data collection, e-commerce support, and subscription-based-service support obligations are often overlooked. She emphasizes the need to balance legal considerations against practical, business considerations and other non-legal concerns. Every client has different priorities, philosophies, and goals, and she enjoys the ability to customize approaches on a client-by-client basis.

With contributions and honors extending beyond her work at ESG, Krista is a member of the ABA Sports Forum leadership team and is one of the co-founders of the Esports Bar Association. In 2019, she was honored by the Sports Business Journal as one of its Game Changers, the SBJ’s list of the most influential women in sports business.

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