Jeffrey L. Kessler

Jeffrey L. Kessler is a partner at the international law firm Winston & Strawn, where he also serves as Co-Executive Chairman and co-chair of the firm's antitrust/competition practice and is a member of the firm's executive committee.

Kessler was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1954 to Edith and Milton Kessler.

He grew up in a community in Brooklyn near Coney Island, called "Sea Gate," with his parents and his older sister Linda.

He went on to Columbia University, graduating summa cum laude from the college in the class of 1975 and then Columbia Law School.

From 1976 to 2003, he was the lead counsel in various complex antitrust, sports law, and intellectual property (IP) law cases, including major jury trials.

He represented a number of U.S. and international companies in criminal and civil investigations in the antitrust and trade areas and was part of the team that successfully defended Matsushita Electric and JVC against claims of a worldwide conspiracy in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Zenith v. Matsushita.

He graduated from Columbia Law School as a Kent Scholar and editor of the Law Review in 1977.

Kessler began working at Weil, Gotshal & Manges as an associate in the Antitrust Department full-time in 1977, after working there as a summer associate in 1976.

He became a partner in 1984.

In 2000, Kessler won a complete jury acquittal of his client Panasonic in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, in a case claiming over $1 billion in damages for an alleged fraud.

He became regarded as a leading commentator on international antitrust law.

He also was the lead counsel in several IP cases involving frontier issues of IP law.

Kessler became known as one of the most prominent sports lawyers in the United States as he became regularly engaged in high-profile sports litigation.

He litigated a number of landmark sports-antitrust cases while at Weil, including McNeil v. The NFL, which culminated in the antitrust jury trial that led to the establishment of free agency in the National Football League (NFL).

He also handled numerous other high-profile sports law cases during his time at Weil Gotshal, including for the NFLPA; the NBPA; the Arena Football League Players Association (AFLPA); the National Hockey League Players Association, the MLBPA; the NFL Coaches Association; Players, Inc.; the Women's Tennis Benefit Association; and Adidas.

Kessler also represented various classes of NBA, NFL, AFL, and MLS players, and several professional leagues, including the North American Soccer League and United States Football League, and the cities of San Diego and Oakland and Alameda County, in groundbreaking sports law disputes.

He also successfully represented Latrell Sprewell in his controversial suspension arbitration.

In 2003, Kessler left Weil to join the law firm Dewey Ballantine.

Dewey Ballantine later merged with the law firm LeBoeuf, Lamb and Kessler became a senior partner at the newly created "super firm" Dewey & LeBoeuf, where he was the chairman of the firm's global litigation department, co-chairman of the sports litigation practice group, and a member of its executive and leadership committees.

During his time at Dewey, Kessler continued to represent the NFLPA and the NBPA in major sports disputes, and also represented the National Invitation Tournament, CAA Sports, Wasserman Media Group, SCP Worldwide, and did landmark pro bono work for South African Amputee Sprinter Oscar Pistorious and Castor Semanaya.

Both runners were successfully represented by Kessler and allowed to compete in the Olympics despite challenges from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAFF).

Kessler continued to negotiate the free agency/salary cap systems in the NFL and NBA on behalf of his player union clients, and he successfully represented Michael Vick in his roster bonus arbitration, Plaxico Burress in his signing bonus arbitration, and numerous other players in successful arbitrations and "special master cases".

Kessler was a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, where he taught a course on complex litigation.

He has written and lectured on a wide variety of antitrust, sports law, and related topics.

He published a new edition of International Trade and U.S. Antitrust Law, a leading treatise on antitrust and trade law issues in a global economy, and was co-editor-in-chief of State Antitrust Practice and Statutes.

Kessler is a former council member and co-chair of the Publications Committee and chairman of the International Antitrust Law Committee, of the Antitrust Section of the American Bar Association (ABA).

He was also a member of the ABA's NAFTA Tri-National Committee and an adjunct professor of law at Fordham Law School.

He was a founding member of the board of advisors of the Georgetown University Study of Private Antitrust Litigation.

Kessler has been recognized by numerous publications, including Chambers USA - America's Leading Lawyers for Business and Best Lawyers in America.

He is recognized by Guide to the World's Leading Antitrust Lawyers and Who's Who of Competition Lawyers and has been included in Super Lawyers, Corporate Counsel Edition, The Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America 2005, 2006, and 2008 through 2011, and The Lawdragon 500 Leading Litigators in America 2006.

Kessler is named in the 2011 edition of The Best Lawyers in America and as a New York Super Lawyer in 2006 through 2012, and he has been named as one of The 50 Most Influential People in Sports Business by Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal and that publication has named him one of the 20 Most Influential People in the NFL numerous times, including in 2011.

Kessler has also been named, repeatedly, a National Antitrust and General Commercial Litigation Star by Benchmark Litigation US.

Until May 2012, he was the global litigation chair at the international law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf, where he was also the co-chair of the sports litigation practice group and served on the firm's executive and leadership committees.

His major clients include the Panasonic Corporation (formerly, Matsushita Electric), National Football League Players Association (NFLPA), the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), William Morris Endeavor, Activision Blizzard, Avanci, the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), United States Women's National Team (USWNT) soccer players, NTN Corporation, Relevant Sports, and Actors' Equity Association.

In May 2012, Kessler left Dewey & LeBoeuf and joined the firm of Winston & Strawn.

Dewey had experienced mass partner defections in 2012 for a variety of reasons, and despite his best efforts in conjunction with several other of the firm's most prominent and successful partners to save the firm, it proved to be unmanageable.

Thus, Kessler led a group of more than 20 other partners, over 40 associates, and a large group of professional staff with him to Winston, where he currently is Co-Executive Chairman.

In total, more than 75 people went with him from Dewey to Winston, including his entire practice.

Since joining Winston, in his most widely reported triumph, Kessler led the Winston team that secured a spectacular victory on behalf of classes of Division I college football and basketball athletes in their landmark antitrust challenge to the compensation restrictions maintained by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and its member “power conferences.” Following oral argument by Kessler, on March 31, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in the Alston litigation affirming the team's “ground-breaking and historic” trial win in the Northern District of California and reiterating that the NCAA is not above the law.

He was one of five Columbia alumni who received the college's 2016 John Jay Award for distinguished professional achievement.