The Chicago Bears on April 9 named Krista Whitaker the team’s executive vice president of legal and business affairs and chief legal officer. 

“I am really excited to innovate with the senior leadership team and bring the Bears to the forefront in Chicago and the NFL,” Whitaker said in a statement. 

The Stanford Law School graduate has focused her career on sports law, working on acquisitions, joint ventures, league expansions, financings and media agreements for clients as an associate at Proskauer Rose for half a dozen years. She leveraged that experience to move in-house in early 2021 as senior associate counsel for the Miami Heat basketball team. She was named vice president and associate general counsel for the team a year and a half later. 

Her transition from private practice to in-house work wasn’t without bumps, Whitaker says. The expanded scope of legal work that’s required when you’re in-house was something new, she said. 

“I felt like I was drinking from a fire hose for several months,” Whitaker said last year in an interview with her former law firm. “I quickly realized how many areas of the law impact the business and the reliance on in-house counsel to understand how the various legal aspects intersect with the business…. Learning to navigate which matters I can handle independently and when to seek external expertise [was] a challenge.”

The variety of work that the experience gave her ended up being an aspect of in-house work that she liked.

“I love that I get to work with so many different people and on so many different projects and matters,” she said. “No single day is the same.” 

Mentorship was crucial for her while at Proskauer and it’s been integral throughout her career, she said.

“I could rely on [mentors] for guidance and to bounce around ideas,” she said in the Proskauer interview. “I learned to tailor my approach based on the nature of each relationship — whether it was a close bond or based on day-to-day interactions.”

Mentorship is what led to her getting tapped to join the Bears. 

While she was getting her J.D. at Stanford Law about 10 years ago, she met Bears CEO Kevin Warren when he was with the Detroit Lions as the team’s chief operations officer. After a panel that Warren had participated in, Whitaker introduced herself and they’ve stayed in contact ever since. 

"I told him I wanted to learn more about his career path,” she said. “He encouraged me to reach out after the conference. I followed up … and we remained in touch. I would see him at different industry events and conferences and we kept in touch on the phone.”

Warren left the Lions in 2019 to become commissioner of the Big 10 conference in college sports, a high-profile role he held until the Bears tapped him as CEO in January. In one of his first moves, he brought in Whitaker three months later. 

"When industry leaders such as Kevin tell law students, 'Reach out,' I always took such leaders up on that offer of support,” she said. “Here I am over a decade later getting to work with Kevin. That is what makes my joining of the Chicago Bears pretty remarkable in my book."

One of the big projects she’ll work on is a new, fixed-roof stadium for the Bears. Warren has said it’s a priority. 

"It will put us in a position to bid for a Super Bowl [and] to bid for a Final Four," Warren has said. "When you think about Chicago, how powerful that city is, to think it has never hosted a Final Four, has never hosted a Super Bowl — and until we get a fixed-roof stadium, it will not host it."

The team has been working on plans to build on a site south of Soldier Field, the Bears’ home since 1971 and where it has played games periodically since 1926. 

The team has pledged $2 billion toward the project. "Our plan is here in the not-too-distant future to be able to get together and lay out a plan, not only with renderings but video, a financial plan, so we can display it to the public," Warren has said. 

Based on Whitaker’s work at Proskauer and the Heat, the legal issues surrounding a new stadium shouldn’t be new to her. Shortly after she joined the basketball team in 2021, she worked on the deal to shift naming rights of American Airlines Arena, where the team plays, to FTX Arena. 

“It was really cool to feel like I was starting a new journey at the same time as our arena and team,” she said in a Miami Heat interview. 

The sports-focused attorney now gets to start a new in-house journey with possibly another new arena, thanks to her decade-old connection.