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The National Basketball Association's 2018-19 season will tip off on Oct. 16, ushering in yet another year of outside legal expenditures for the league and its players.

The labor union that represents the interests of NBA players—the New York-based National Basketball Players Association (NBPA)—filed its annual financial statement with the U.S. Department of Labor on Sept. 28. The document, known as an LM-2, delineates the NBPA's finances for the one-year period between July 1, 2017 and June 30, 2018.

One large law firm, Sidley Austin, took in far more than the nearly two-dozen other firms whose work on behalf of the NBPA are revealed in its most recent LM-2. Sidley, which represented former NBPA executive director G. William “Billy” Hunter in his five-year legal battle with the union stemming from his 2013 ouster as leader, saw its San Francisco office receive a $3.43 million payment from the NBPA on Dec. 14, 2017. That was just days after the union and Hunter settled a $10 million suit that he filed against the NBPA in Los Angeles Superior Court.

A Sidley spokeswoman did not return a request for comment about the payment, nor did media representatives for the NBPA. This past July, the NBPA re-elected current executive director Michele Roberts to another four-year term. Roberts, a former litigation partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Washington, D.C., initially took over the union's top leadership role in 2014 after Hunter was pushed out following an internal investigation of the NBPA's business practices conducted by Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

Dave Anderson.

The American Lawyer reported a year ago this week that partners from Dechert and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe were advising the NBPA in the litigation with Hunter, who had a bifurcated a trial date scheduled for early 2018. David Anderson, the San Francisco-based Sidley litigator who took the lead representing Hunter, has since been tapped by the Trump administration to serve as the next U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California. Last month Anderson disclosed a $4.07 million partnership share at Sidley. (Hunter, Anderson's former client, is also a former federal prosecutor.)

Orrick was paid nearly $1.02 million by the NBPA in 2017-18, according to the union's LM-2, while Dechert, which hired former Orrick litigation partner Christina Sarchio a year ago, received $208,177 for its efforts. The NBPA also paid $385,823 in legal fees to Paul Weiss and nearly $1.04 million to Wilkinson Walsh + Eskovitz, a Washington, D.C.-based firm formed in early 2016 by former Paul Weiss litigators Beth Wilkinson and Alexandra Walsh. Winston & Strawn, a firm that has long had ties to the NBPA through co-executive chairman Jeffrey Kessler, took in $160,128 for its work on behalf of the union in 2017-18.

Other law firms receiving payments from the NBPA include: Washington, D.C.'s Groom Law Group ($186,220); New York's Meister Seelig & Fein ($51,721); Boston-based Hemenway & Barnes ($46,836); Davis & Gilbert ($45,240); Ropes & Gray ($41,444); Kirkland & Ellis ($29,471); Syracuse, New York-based Blitman & King ($27,130); Akin Gump ($23,477); Sullivan & Cromwell ($20,026); the Los Angeles-based Di Martino Law Group ($18,400); Arent Fox ($13,500); Great Neck, New York-based Garfunkel Wild ($13,160); Altshuler Berzon ($10,259); and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan ($8,308). Peter Ginsberg, a former Crowell & Moring partner who now has his own New York-based civil litigation and criminal defense firm that specializes in representing sports industry clients, was also paid $15,490.

Michele Roberts.

Roberts, in her role as head of the NBPA, oversees a formidable in-house team that includes new general counsel Clarence Nesbitt, a former director of global grand business affairs at Nike Inc. who spent the past year as general counsel of the union's licensing and marketing arm Think450. The NBPA's LM-2 shows that Nesbitt was paid $332,310 in 2017-18, a year in which Roberts received more than $2.4 million in total compensation. Nesbitt replaces recently retired NBPA general counsel W. Gary Kohlman, who was paid $657,214 by the union before being hired in June as senior litigation counsel for District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine, a former Venable partner.

Other in-house lawyers on the NBPA's payroll include senior collective bargaining counsel Ronald Klempner ($485,055); deputy general counsel David Foster ($223,956) and Ramya Ravindran ($229,451); and associate general counsel Kirk Berger ($131,056) and Joi Garner ($62,115). The union and the NBA, which is led by league commissioner and former Cravath, Swaine & Moore associate Adam Silver, signed a seven-year collective bargaining agreement in December 2016.

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