About

With the estimated cost of piracy and counterfeiting projected by some estimates to reach into the trillions of dollars by the early 2020s, Major League Baseball’s (MLB) globally popular sporting product and related retail and other in-demand brands are particularly exposed to the pernicious effects of counterfeiting and piracy. Ethan Orlinsky is senior vice president and general counsel for Major League Baseball Properties, which controls merchandising and licensing efforts for all 30 MLB teams. Though a daunting brief, Orlinsky’s has vast expertise in the areas of IP and licensing protection – he has worked for MLB Properties since 1992, prior to which he was an attorney at Simpson Thacher and Bartlett based in New York and London – which makes him the ideal person to safeguard the organisation’s brand. Of course, even with Orlinsky’s skill set it is a complex role that requires managing the needs and objectives of a number of different stakeholders: ‘As well as senior management, the 30 clubs and the people with whom we enter into agreements have to be taken into account. I am very proud of having worked with the head league business and operations managers and head legal officers at all of the 30 teams in the League in terms of rights and obligations’. Orlinsky is also a forward-thinking and ambitious department head, and under his stewardship, the MLB Properties legal department has grown both in terms of skill and the scope of its responsibilities. ‘Over time, more and more work has been taken in-house, so that now that the work is done primarily by the lawyers who are employed by the company’, he explains. ‘Consequently, areas of business are expedited on a more knowledgeable basis, and we are able to react quickly, responsibly and thoroughly to any legal challenges’. Being responsible for as prominent an enterprise as MLB Properties – ‘it is an institution, as well as a business’, he points out – has given Orlinsky a keen eye for what makes a great general counsel, and sees five primary attributes that individuals need to show throughout their employment to achieve success as an in-house lawyer. Orlinsky explains that ‘there are a minimum of five tools: firstly, one must have complex legal knowledge, the ability to identify issues well utilising a high level of intelligence; secondly, one must be able to come up with various options and approaches for solving challenges; thirdly, the in-house lawyer should exercise judgment in order to provide a recommendation; fourthly, excellent communication skills both verbally and in written form; and finally in the category of social intelligence an in-house lawyer should excel and have a “good bedside manner”’.