The first female player’s agent in the National Football League credits her long career of legal firsts to her business and relationship skills and not just her legal acumen. 

“My business knowledge is 90% of my day,” Ellen Zavian, general counsel at USA Lacrosse, says in a podcast with LinkSquares chief legal officer Tim Parilla. 

As a law student in the 1980s, Zavian parlayed an internship with the NFL Players Association into her early career as a player’s agent, first with a firm and then in her own practice. 

“I started [as an intern] helping agents negotiate contracts,” she said. “I would put together the package of what the agents had going into the room and I realized, one, they weren’t that much smarter than me, and two, I knew how to do research probably better than they did.” 

In those years, players struggled for bargaining power despite the work of the agents representing them. It wasn’t until the 1987 player’s strike that the balance of power started shifting. “We worked to get them rights and a percentage of the revenue stream,” she said. 

The relationships she built with players as an intern helped pave her way into the field. 

“I got a lot of phone calls from players whose agents were screwing them over,” she said. “They were calling me to help them represent themselves. I had a player who said, ‘When you leave, I’ll come with you.’”

Field change

Zavian pivoted in 1996 to soccer and softball, helping women players assert themselves in their disputes with the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee and the U.S. Soccer Federation. 

“We created the first collective bargaining agreement for female athletes in the Olympics, and a pregnancy leave clause was part of that,” she said of her work with soccer players. “We did their World Cup agreement in 1998 as well, and created group licensing, which I took from my days at the NFLPA.”

In 2000, Zavian moved into extreme sports — inline skating, skateboarding and BMX racing. 

“They hired me to represent them on their images on ESPN in the X Games,” she said. “I was pretty excited because the first part of my career I was a woman as an agent, but the X Gamers really made me realize they couldn’t care less what my gender was. I was just wearing a suit.”

Another foray into representing players, in 2013, was motivated by her son, who in his younger years was a breakdancing fan.  

“I realized [breakdancing] is a great sport that could meet the mission statement of the International Olympic Committee,” she said. “After a presentation to one of the breakdancers — my son’s teacher — I said, ‘Let’s move this into an association.’”

Red Bull had already started organizing breakdancing events, she said, so it was important for players to have representation to help them professionalize the sport and raise its profile.

“Two years later it was announced that Paris 2024 would have breakdancing in it,” she said. “So, I’m super excited I’m going. I’ll be there in the front row.”

In-house roles

Although much of her career has been in player representation, Zavian isn’t new to in-house work. She was associate general counsel at the Association of Corporate Counsel for several years and then was CLO and general counsel at model forms company KMStandards for two years after leaving ACC in 2011.  

Zavian joined USA Lacrosse in 2022 as its general counsel, where she’s trying to help get Lacrosse featured at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. “We’re competing against breakdancing.”

Zavian said she spent her first six months at USA Lacrosse mostly answering questions and listening to others to understand the dynamics of the organization and its goals.  

“It sounds odd,” she said. “I should have touched down and hit the ground running, created policies and governance, but I didn’t.”

Zavian credits her business background and relationship-building as key to her approach to work, and those skills have helped inform what she says is her real passion: negotiating.

Generative AI and other technology tools might someday take the place of lawyers in drafting contracts, she said, but negotiating those contracts is something that will probably not change.

“We may not write the contracts, but we have to get the two people in the room on the same page,” she said. “That skill set we still need to develop.”

Now that she’s in her second year at USA Lacrosse, she’s tapping the expertise of others at the organization as she starts drafting new governance documents and otherwise acting on what she learned during her first year. 

“You have to be willing to lean on your colleagues and trust their niche knowledge,” she said.