By Michael Fisch with reporting by Seth Jones
Law community
In March 2020, DraftKings, a global sports betting and online fantasy sports company, was preparing to go public when the pandemic brought live NBA games, and later the other major leagues, to a halt. Soon, the only professional sports being played live were South Korean baseball and Russian table tennis. Suffice it to say that a sports and entertainment company couldn’t rely only on Russian table tennis as a revenue driver.
In fantasy sports, participants create imaginary teams made up of proxies of professional players. The teams compete based on the statistical performance of those players in actual games.
“We always targeted mid- to late-April 2020 for the close of our deal and our public listing on NASDAQ as ‘DKNG’,” says R. Stanton Dodge JD’95, chief legal officer of DraftKings and a member of Suffolk Law’s Dean’s Cabinet. “Then the NBA suspended live games. We all looked at each other and said, ‘Holy cow, this is going to cascade.’ We could not have been thrown a bigger curveball.”
Literally weeks away from going public, Dodge and his colleagues had no idea how the pandemic would progress, or how the markets might react. “What do you do in that scenario? The best thing you can do is just not panic. Focus on what you can control,” he says.
DraftKings’ lawyers, financial analysts, and the rest of the team working on the public listing decided to stick to the planned date of April 23. Pulling it off required a creative approach that looked beyond traditional, live, inperson sports, Dodge says. To keep customers engaged, the DraftKings team created free-to-play games that relied on the results of political debates, weather forecasts, and reality shows like Shark Tank, Survivor, and Top Chef.
The company also started airing hyper-realistic professional football game simulations on YouTube, which kept viewers connected with their favorite teams—any day of the week. That helped drive DraftKings’ fantasy football business while traditional games were on pause. Esports matches featuring the world’s best video game players were also popular.
In addition, the company’s iGaming apps (including roulette, blackjack, and slots) “performed well during the pandemic as more casino players were stuck at home,” according to online business magazine Marker.
When in-person sporting matches finally came back, the company and its investors saw a lift from so many sports resuming at the same time, regardless of their typical season. “We ended up having all these sports played together, which never would have happened otherwise,” Dodge says, “like the Masters was played in November” as opposed to the world-famous golf tournament’s usual spring schedule.
The gamble seems to have paid off. As of January 6, the company’s stock value had increased about 30 percent over its IPO starting point.
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R. Stanton Dodge JD’95, chief legal officer of DraftKings and a member of Suffolk Law’s Dean’s Cabinet
“Grab the Pen”
Before the pandemic, in February 2020, Dodge visited Suffolk to give the Donahue Lecture, the Law School’s annual speaker series featuring legal leaders. In the middle of one of his funny and often self-deprecating stories, the phone in his pocket started ringing—a Grateful Dead ringtone piercing through the aisles of the Law School’s oak-paneled moot courtroom.
It was a perfect interruption for a speech about being true to yourself and letting the chips fall where they may. He hoped, he said, to convince at least one person in the audience to figure out what they loved and to find a way to marry that passion with the law.
Asked by a student about the most important skills for attorneys, Dodge pointed to the need to be extremely detail oriented. His mentors at DISH Network, where he worked from 1996 to 2017, tore apart his early contracts, explaining that sometimes it takes an hour to write a short paragraph to get the wording precisely right.
His boss at DISH presented him with a hypothetical situation: “Let’s say you’re negotiating, and a bunch of people from the other party say, ‘Let’s go celebrate— get some dinner and some wine. Who’s going to draft the contract?’”
Dodge responded that he’d oblige and join the celebration. His boss bellowed back, “No! Grab the pen. Always take the pen—always want to be the person drafting the contract.”
“Since then,” Dodge said, “I’ve never given up the pen to anyone.” That meant late nights fine-tuning contracts, which his friends said sounded boring. “But, I got a charge out of it,” he said. “It goes back to finding out what makes you happy.”
Image by Michael J. Clarke
