Sam Katz on NFL Disability Benefits and Fighting for Former Players

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Ray: Hey everyone, welcome to a new episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR. I'm your host, Ray DeLorenzi, and today I'm honored to be joined by Sam Katz with Athlaw LLP. Sam may not be a household name to you, but that's because you are not a former NFL player. In that community, Sam is the lawyer that they go to when they have a disability issue. And with the start of the NFL season, I could think of no one better to join the podcast than Sam Katz. Sam, thanks so much for joining us today.

Sam: Thanks so much for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast, obviously a big fan of your team. So very excited to be here.

Ray: Sam, I'm interested in what drew you to become a lawyer in the first place. Why don't you tell me a little bit about where you grew up? I also understand that as a kid you worked in a sports memorabilia store. So tell me about your upbringing.

Sam: Yeah. LA born and raised. As you mentioned, huge sports fan. I worked in a sports memorabilia store where I felt like I had the dream job back then, getting to go in and talk about sports and watch people open up cards of my favorite players. It was a dream come true. From there I went to college. While in college, I interned at Athletes First, which is the premier sports agency in football. They taught me doing things the right way and providing an excellent service. It sells itself. You don't need to take shortcuts or do things the wrong way. Just work hard and produce an excellent service. And especially in this community, players talk.

From there, I decided I'm going to go be a lawyer. I was really hoping at the time that if I went to law school and got a graduate degree, I could come back and be a sports agent. Then I got to law school, and after working my butt off, I saw there were so many different areas of law I could be doing, that I was succeeding at in law school and enjoying the material. People asked how I did so well in law school. I was scared. I basically lived in the library until it would close every night. I became a staple of the library. If I didn't have class and I wasn't sleeping, I was in the library studying. My outlines were like 900 pages. I definitely got made fun of by my peers.

But when I got that first grade in law school, I remember sitting on the couch with my mom. Grades are supposed to come out at a certain time, and I look up and there's the grade. And I go, "Mom, my thing's broken." I call up my buddy and say, "Hey, did your grade come out?" He says, "Yeah, I got like a B." I said, "Man, my thing's not working. It says 4.33." And he says, "No, man, that means you set the curve." I didn't even know a 4.33 existed.

From that point, and it's going to sound super cliché, my motto is work hard and believe in yourself. The hard work is: work as hard as you can and leave no room for excuses, whether that's giving all your time, all your effort and all your attention, or being willing to sacrifice things that don't get you to the greater goal. That first semester of law school, there was one person whose dad had been at the same law school, and he had the outline from the A-plus student the prior year. Everybody seemed to have the shortcut. There are moments where you spend time doubting your own hard work. After getting that grade, it was a wake-up call: if I work as hard as I can, leave no room for excuses and believe in that hard work, there's no need to get distracted. I've taken that same approach through my legal career.

I worked hard in law school and transferred to USC Law School, which was my dream school. I was there another two years, and thank God for the USC network and for continuing to study in libraries all the way through law school. By the end, a former NFL player who had gone back to school found me where anybody would find me at any given moment: at USC's library. He would ask me about this issue and that. I'd say, "Look, I'm not a lawyer, but reach out to me when I'm a lawyer." And lo and behold, when I passed the bar, that same player reached out to me and said, "Hey, can you help me out with my LOD and T&P?" Probably like many of the viewers right now, I was thinking, and I'm not going to curse on here, "What the F is LOD and T&P?" That's what I said to him. And he said to me...

Ray: Hey Sam, I want to put a pin in that story for a second. You were working as a high schooler in a sports memorabilia store and clearly interested in sports. Why go the lawyer path in the first place? Did you have any aspiration to be an athlete, or was that never in the cards for Sam Katz? What made you say law school is interesting to me?

Sam: My great fundamentals couldn't, at least at that point, defeat the super talent. I had a pretty early idea that I would not be making it to the NBA. I did not have Allen Iverson's skills. But I always knew I wanted to work in sports. Getting there was more of a "work hard and hopefully the right opportunity comes around." When I was at Athletes First, they told me to go to law school. Getting such phenomenal advice from people I look up to and really admire, it made sense. So I dropped what I was doing and started studying for the LSAT. The decision to go to law school and be a lawyer came from people I admired in the sports field, who had taught me so much, telling me that was the move. Of course I was going to go do that.

Ray: Being at a sports agency, I think we both came of age when Jerry Maguire was the movie. Was that what you thought a sports agency would be like? What was it actually like? And I know you're not a sports agent now, but more sports agents today aren't lawyers. How has that affected your view of how the agency world has shifted?

Sam: That's a great question. You mentioned Jerry Maguire. "Show me the money," right? That's totally how I viewed the sports agency world. My God, this is the coolest job. And I'm so grateful for the opportunity Athletes First gave me. When I got there, a couple things stood out. Number one, how tight that firm was, not just amongst the agents and staff, but with their clients. They gave their clients real attention and didn't treat them like a number or a dollar amount. They treated them the way any human being would want to be treated by somebody representing their interests: somebody who cares and wants to see them succeed on and off the field.

I expected the sports agency world to be "you've got to cut this corner and that corner," and it wasn't. They taught me, and I'm going to keep saying it, to provide an excellent service and really focus on that. Don't cut corners. Don't take shortcuts.

Especially in the world of sports, I've come up with something I call the chicken wing theory. Nobody taught it to me; I learned it from experience. It makes sense if you keep in mind that the greatest chicken wing is winning. You'll have player one, and player one has a lawyer, lawyer one, whose entire income and client base is player one. On the other side, you have player two and lawyer two, whose entire income and client base is player two. One lawyer doubling their client base and one lawyer losing theirs is as simple as player one saying to player two in the locker room, "Hey, my lawyer had the coolest chicken wing party this weekend. There were 32 flavors of chicken wings, cherry lemon pepper." And the other guy going, "Wait, your guy had cherry lemon pepper wings? I've never had that before. Can I get your guy's number?"

It's not that I've ever thrown a chicken wing party, but the theme is that winning, or success, is the greatest chicken wing. That's how Athlaw picks up all of our clients today. It's one guy saying to another guy. We don't ask our clients to go recruit or solicit. It's just one guy telling his buddy, "I've had this success with my law firm," and next thing you know, that other guy is giving us a call. I always ask, "Who sent you?" And it's always nice to hear that our clients, some of whom I haven't talked to for years, are still speaking very highly of us and doing their buddies a solid. So, coming back to it, Athletes First taught me to provide an excellent service, and I'm so grateful for the lessons I learned there.

One more point about Athletes First, because they gave me this remarkable opportunity. I'll call it my "Almost Famous" moment, because it's not like LeBron James was my roommate in college or my brother was some top agent. After interning there for quite some time, they had a very large rookie class, basically their draft class. The agents have their rookies come live and train near the agency in California, and there were about 30 of them. I had become quite close with this class. I was about 21 at the time, the age of a lot of the guys. They lived in paired-up apartments, and one of the players had an empty room. A couple of the players went to the agents and said, "Hey, can Sam come live with us for the next three months of the draft process?" That was a game-changing moment for me, and I'll forever be grateful for it.

For basically three months in the pre-draft process, it was 30 NFL rookies at Athletes First living with me: Brooks Foster, Clay Matthews, B.J. Raji, Mark Sanchez, Pat White. It was an awesome experience. I had idolized these people. I'd looked at their NFL mock drafts. I'd written NFL mock drafts with them in them. Getting to meet them as people and seeing what they're like as individuals really opened my eyes to trying to serve not just a client, but a person. Everybody's different. There's no one-size-fits-all approach. To this day, when a client calls me, it's not "let's give some generalized advice that works for everybody." It's "let's look at this client's facts and come up with advice that's best for them." Yes, there is some generalized advice, for example what the claims administrator tells us to tell our clients, or what the law requires of all our clients. But treating everybody as an individual is something I learned there, and by doing that, you can give the best advice for that specific client.

Ray: Going back to that fateful moment when that former football player keeps approaching you in the library and then asks you about line of duty benefits. At that point you had no idea what those were. What made you want to go investigate, instead of saying, "Hey, go call someone else"?

Sam: That's a great question. The quick answer is one word: sports. This is something dealing with sports. For all I knew, it could have turned out to be some random other issue, but the opportunity to work in sports is what drove me. A quick story that might help here: when I was doing on-campus interviews in law school, my resume was all sports, sports, sports. I remember going into one big international law firm, and we're talking sports the whole time. At the end of the interview they asked me, "So why do you want to do corporate finance and securities?" And I said, "Well, what sports law firm do you know that pays..." At that time it was $160,000, what Big Law paid. Apparently that's not what I was supposed to say. But I've always been very blunt and very candid.

Years later, I've found being blunt and candid really does work well with clients. Not telling guys what they want to hear, not telling guys things are worse than they are, just telling guys what I know and what my candid advice would be.

Coming back to it, that former player phones me and asks, "Can you help me out with my LOD and T&P?" And I treated it like the class where I got that first 4.33, legal research and writing. Your professor gives you a hundred pages of facts about a hypothetical client and their issue, and you do legal research to build a brief or a memo to answer that client's issue. I treated it just like that. I was a couple of days a lawyer at that point. Let me go research the case law. I printed out every NFL disability case, every pleading, every NFL disability plan. Just like I did in law school, I started with the earliest pleading, case and plan, and in chronological order, I just read the case law. The more I read it, the more fascinated I became.

ERISA is known for being very complex. All that hard work I did in law school, not taking my foot off the pedal, paid off. I always told myself I never know what type of legal issue I'll be dealing with as a lawyer. With ERISA, you're dealing with trusts and contracts, at points it feels like torts, you deal with remedies and breaches of fiduciary duty, and with labor law. You're dealing with so many different areas of law that I remember thinking, thank God I didn't take that week off in law school or take a shortcut on that subject, because things that could have been huge obstacles when reading the case law didn't hold me up. The more I read, the more fascinated I became with the material.

Ray: Sam, sorry to interrupt. You become fascinated with that issue, which is one thing, but how do you take that and say, "I'm right out of law school, I'm going to start my own law firm and focus on this"? Did you have professors or mentors who said, "Are you insane?" Or were you just like, "This is what I'm good at, and this is what I want"?

Sam: I think it was both. I'm not going to call anybody out by name, but there were a lot of people telling me I was crazy. Luckily, I kind of knew that. This was definitely not something I had seen somebody do. I'll say this: during my remedies class, we had a judge, Judge Siegel, and he was a great professor. At one point he had a lawyer come speak to the class. This lawyer told his story about how, straight out of law school, somebody came to him to sue the church. After 10 or 15 years, he basically had to take out a second mortgage on his house, wondering whether this was even working. I remember the professor asking, "How much did you end up settling for?" And it was something like 1.4 or 1.5 billion. And the professor asked, "What was your attorney fee on that?" And it was like 45 percent.

I remember thinking, wow, it took 10 or 15 years, and there were times it seemed like it was not going well. It's like that meme: I'm starting a business, it's going great; no, it's terrible; wow, it's going better; no, it's terrible. That gave me hope. Just do what I've done, which is study as hard as I can and learn the material. I knew I was going up against a 10- or 20-billion-dollar-per-year entity, probably even more than that. I'd better know my stuff. There weren't going to be shortcuts. So I read through all the material, I read through it again, and again. I became obsessed. I guess you have to be. Passion wins, and luckily I was passionate about it.

Another former player, who was really my best friend and my roommate when I was at Athletes First, had just retired. He was asking me, "Sam, what are you doing?" I told him, and he said, "That's awesome. I've heard a bunch of guys need help with this." So now I'm hearing from multiple players that there's this huge need. I kept studying it. I spent two years reading the material over and over, to the point where it's still ingrained in here, and I still learn new things rereading those cases today. After two years, I submitted that first case, and we won full benefits for that player. That guy told five guys. Not us telling him to go tell five guys; he told them because we did a great job, and they told five guys, and here we are.

I would speak about it obsessively. My friends from law school, who had great jobs, would ask me how I was doing, and I'd tell them I was studying the disability benefits stuff. I asked one of my friends from law school, "I wrote this legal brief from scratch. It's going to be my first brief. Can you read it? I feel like I'm going crazy, and I've put my whole life into this thing. Just tell me if I'm as crazy as I think I am." She read it and went, "My God, this is amazing. I want in." And I was like, "Wait, what? I've made no money doing this yet." And she said, "No, this is going to be great. I want in." Lo and behold, she joined, and today she's one of the partners at my firm.

As we grew, I went to each of my best friends from law school, one at a time, and told them what I was doing: the demand for us is up here, and the supply of us as lawyers is down here. Each of my best friends joined the firm, one at a time. But the more supply we added, the higher the demand kept going. Then I ran out of best friends from law school. I was a bit of a lone wolf in law school, so I only had so many. The one or two I approached after that weren't interested, and I felt like I was just annoying people. At that point we started doing on-campus interviews.

There are lots of struggles and obstacles and moments where you could very easily doubt the process. But reading those cases, I trusted the vision of what I saw when I was first studying this stuff. I could see there was going to be a huge demand. And at that point the focus wasn't so much on getting the word out. It was: let me make the service great. Once the service is great, that's the time the word can get out, first naturally, and then, obviously, by getting the word out about a great service. I'm not worried that we get the word out and people find out we're terrible at what we do. Anybody who comes to us is going to get that same excellent service.

I remind myself every day that we're not template lawyers. We're not fill-in-the-blank lawyers. Yes, I could have become a template lawyer six years ago with a good process. Instead, every single time we produce something new, I want whoever the reader is, whether it's a court, the NFL claims administrator, the NFL concussion special master or the NFL disability board, to think, "Wow, did you see what they did this time?" And I instill that not just in myself but in each lawyer at the firm: stay passionate, stay hungry.

Ray: Sam, I'm interested in understanding, just in brief, when a former player comes to you, have they already taken their shot at getting benefits and been denied unfairly? Or are they coming to you from the start, not knowing where to begin? In part, the NFL promotes these benefits as always taking care of former players, and if it were so easy, they wouldn't need you in the first place. So in brief, what position are former players in when they come to you?

Sam: That's a great question. When players first come to us, going back to something I said earlier, we look at the individual. Now we have the class action we've been working on for the last few years, but with individual cases, you'll have players who are fresh out of the NFL and just retired, and for them there's a certain path based on their facts. Then we have the players who, maybe a client wouldn't want to be my favorite type of client, but my favorite type of client is not necessarily somebody fresh out of the NFL. My favorite type of client is somebody who has already tried and lost.

Ideally, if they had prior representation and they're coming to us for new representation, that's my favorite type of client. With guys like that, I can see what the process was and what went wrong. Maybe they didn't provide all the records, or their lawyer didn't know to make a certain argument that's out there based on the statute or the case law, or ideally both. Many of the players coming to us have given up hope. They think the plan is trying to screw the player over no matter what. Being able to look at it and say, "Wait a minute, don't give up hope," breaking down a guy's case for him and giving him legal advice, like "you didn't submit this document," or "they denied you for something they're denying every player for, in violation of ERISA."

There are very common, uniform illegal policies that the NFL disability board applies to every player for certain benefits. Being able to point that out and say, "This wasn't about you. This is a greater systemic issue." For example, we didn't learn until around 2021 that they were fraudulently misrepresenting that they review all of a player's records. They were telling players they review all their records, but then they admitted that, in practice, they don't actually review all of them. Whatever the client needs that we can provide sound legal advice on, that's what we're here for. Doing things the right way, with the same lessons I learned at Athletes First: provide an excellent service, focus on the client, and don't blow up too fast.

Early in my career, there were points where, as our supply of lawyers and the demand both went up, I didn't even want to take new clients. My phone would keep blowing up, and I'd say, "Look, I'm not taking new clients right now." I never wanted to take on too many and then have to cut the service in half. It was funny, though: it actually made the demand go up when we weren't taking new clients. That wasn't on purpose, but I noticed it. I've seen lawyers take on a thousand clients, where the name of the game is signing as many guys as they can. That's never been the name of the game for us. The name of the game has been providing the clients we have an excellent service, and sticking by that goal has worked well for us.

Ray: Because you specialize in this, when you file something, whether with disability benefits or the concussion settlement, do you think the folks reviewing your submissions see your name on it? It's not that they favor you, but do they take it more seriously than someone who just came off the street and is doing it for the first time? Have you noticed any theme there?

Sam: I wouldn't say there's any type of favoritism by any means. And these are two different programs. The concussion settlement is a very fair program. There's awesome lead class counsel at Seeger Weiss. There's a fair claims administrator that is extremely meticulous, and that's a great thing. There are special masters who are venerable and wise, who know the material and have helped develop very strong, guiding precedent. And there are fair judges: Judge Brody and now Judge Wilson. For the concussion settlement, I would hope that when they see our work, they see the meticulousness we put in, and hopefully that becomes our reputation. I don't think reputation makes a difference in the outcome of a case. We win cases, we lose cases.

It's certainly nice to hope that somebody out there is recognizing the work we've done, but I don't think it sways anything. The hope is that it comes down to the client's facts and sound advice, like telling a client, "Tell the truth, be honest and be candid." That might seem like obvious advice, but it's probably some of the greatest advice we can give a client in the NFL concussion settlement.

NFL disability benefits are different from the concussion settlement. They miss the boat a lot of times. But there, too, I don't think there's favoritism one way or the other. I would hope that when they see our work, as opposed to just our name, they think, "This must be Athlaw, because only Athlaw would put this type of meticulousness into the work." My hope would be that they see the work and think, "That must be Athlaw," as opposed to, "This is Athlaw, so the work is going to look like this."

Ray: To close out, Sam, with the new NFL season starting, the sport is more popular than ever. At the same time, there are more stories than ever about former players and the problems with disability benefits. While the benefits may be generous, they're only as generous as they are accessible, and accessing them is not particularly easy. What would you hope for in the next 10 years that would allow more former players to access the benefits they bargained for and deserve?

Sam: That's a great question. Do we have three more hours? I'm just kidding. When it comes to the NFL concussion settlement, I would hope that, especially in the next couple of years, players are getting tested. Even players who don't believe they have any issues should at least get tested and take their baseline assessment program exam while that program exists. The NFL concussion settlement is going to be around for the next 50-plus years. Maybe somebody is totally fine right now, but they should go in, get checked out and be honest, open and transparent about whatever is going on with their daily activities, whether it's something or nothing. At least go in and get evaluated.

For NFL disability benefits, I won't go too much into the pending litigation, the class action in Alford v. NFL disability plan, but we're hoping changes come from the success we've had in this class action, and that the remedies we're seeking come to fruition. We feel very good about where we are, especially after defeating the motion to dismiss and defeating them on all counts on their summary judgment motions. What we hope for is fairness. We hope NFL disability benefits stop being a process of cherry-picking facts, as the NFL disability board does, and the owners in particular, to find a way to deny a guy who really deserves something.

I hope the changes that come about make it instead a process that recognizes these players have been beat up. They've been through a lot. They've put their bodies, their brains and their minds on the line for something we all love watching on Sunday, Monday, Thursday and sometimes Saturday. NFL disability benefits aren't "I just want something extra." Guys collectively bargained for these benefits. If they meet the criteria, it's something they factor in: "I can go play an extra couple of years, because I know my family is taken care of and I'm taken care of if anything happens to me." I want to see the process designed around the actual goal of the plan. According to Bromburst Propel, the goal of the plan is to compensate players for investing themselves in the sport. We'd hope to see that really become the focus, as opposed to, "How can we screw these guys over?"

Ray: With that, Sam Katz of Athlaw LLP, the retired NFL player community is very lucky to have you, and the podcast is very lucky to have you as our latest guest. Thanks so much, Sam, for your time.

Sam: Thank you so much. It's such an honor to be here, and thank you so much for having me. I would see all the great names and great lawyers you've interviewed before, and I was hoping that maybe one day we'd do great enough work that I'd get the chance. So I'm very honored to have been here. Thanks again, Ray, for everything you do. Let's go. Thanks so much, Ray.

Ray: This is how you know you've made it, Sam. Thanks, Sam.