Damon T. Jones: Stepping Up to the Plate
Since joining the Washington Nationals baseball team as Vice President and Club Counsel in late July, Damon T. Jones has been fielding requests for premium seating and complimentary tickets from almost everyone he knows. “So far,” admits Jones, “I’ve been able to say, ‘I’ve just started and I don’t know how any of that works yet.’” Pretty soon, he will need a new line.
Damon T. Jones
A lifelong baseball fan, Jones concedes that a thorough understanding of the game is not required to do most of his job, but it definitely helps—“particularly with baseball salary arbitration and when other issues related to baseball contracts, players, and statistics come up,” notes Jones, who was an outfielder on his college team at the University of California Santa Barbara. “And generally speaking, knowing baseball enables me to fit in, keep abreast, and contribute ideas more easily. Not to say the job doesn’t call for substantive skills, because it does. There is a wide range of legal work, including everything from sponsorship agreements and construction agreements related to the new stadium to First Amendment and intellectual property issues.”
Jones first learned about his job by word of mouth. “A friend tipped me off that the Nationals were looking for a lawyer,” recalls Jones. “At the time, I wasn’t looking for a career change, but the more I thought about it, it seemed right: Finding a great new job that dovetails with your interests and skill set [litigation, transaction, and baseball], and doesn’t require uprooting your family, is simply too good not to look into.”
Now, as the one-man legal department of a fledgling team with a new ownership group looking forward to its third season and a new ballpark opening in the spring, Jones is in a unique position to grow with a promising Major League franchise. “Everything legal comes my way—I’m learning the business from top to bottom,” he explains.
Prior to joining the Nationals, Jones was an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, DC. Widely regarded as one of the premier litigation firms in the country, Williams & Connolly also boasts a strong sports tradition. The firm’s late founder, Edward Bennett Williams, a renowned litigator and devoted sportsman, owned the Baltimore Orioles baseball team from 1979 until his death in 1988, and was part owner and president of the Washington Redskins football team for 20 years. The firm also began representing elite athletes in the 1990s, helping them to structure their business relationships and counseling them on all aspects of their professional careers.
When first hired by Williams & Connolly in 2002, Jones (then roughly three years out of Harvard Law School) dealt primarily with litigation matters and moonlighted in the firm’s sports department. Within three years, he had transitioned into sports full time; by the time he left the firm earlier this year, he had helped to establish the new baseball portion of the firm’s lucrative sports practice.
A California native, Jones enthusiastically has made DC his home and the Nats his hometown team. Rather than looking ahead to his next career move, Jones is heeding his wife’s typically sensible advice: “I feel that I’m in the right place, appropriately challenged,” says Jones. “So, for now, I’m going to work hard and enjoy a really great job.” DB
Patrick Folliard is a freelance writer based in Silver Spring, Md.
From the November/December 2007 issue of Diversity & The Bar®