Samuel Cuthbert

Samuel Cuthbert is a barrister at Outer Temple Chambers. Called to the bar in 2018, Samuel is a specialist sports law barrister. He often represents athletes, clubs, national governing bodies, and other stakeholders. For example, recently, Samuel has appeared for Motorsport UK, acted in CAS proceedings following an international football match, and has acted on behalf of a horse racing betting club. Furthermore, Samuel is a member of the Pro Bono Panel at Sports Resolutions.[1]
 
1. Why did you choose to practice as a barrister, rather than a solicitor?   

I always wanted to go to the bar because I was interested in advocacy and I knew that I liked public speaking. I did debating at school and university, and so knew I’d enjoy being on my feet in court. I also took part in a mock trial competition during my undergraduate degree and absolutely loved the thrill of the advocacy. There is an intellectual stimulation that comes with the job, and the mix of advocacy and intellectual stimulation made the Bar a very obvious profession for me. I suppose there was also the draw of being self-employed, which was appealing because I liked the idea of being able to build a practice that suited me and that I was interested in. 
 
2. When did you first gain an interest in sports law?   

I suppose my interest in sports law was initially prefaced by an interest in sport in general. When I started practising at the Bar, I realised the breadth of interesting sports matters being litigated and started to question how I might move towards those interesting cases. In pupillage and my first few years of practice, I took on a number of amateur sports injury cases, albeit relatively minor ones, which exposed me to the regulatory frameworks of a couple national governing bodies. I enjoyed the precise nature of the regulatory points being taken – often about the construction and interplay of parallel sets of rules and regulations – and realised that I was actually really interested in doing the regulatory side of sports law. The commercial sports work that I do often engages regulatory angles too.
 
3. How was your first sports-related case?  

Well, really interesting. I suppose the first pure sports case I did (i.e., the first kind of regulatory case that I did) would’ve been an anti-doping case, which was fascinating because those are the sorts of matters that you see and hear about in the news and read about in the papers, and then suddenly you find yourself doing that kind of work. You’ve got somebody’s professional career on the line. There are also interesting arguments about how various things are metabolised by the body and so there’s a real kind of scientific learning curve as well. For me, it satisfied a number of things. I obviously got the bug for it and I’m now doing lots, lots more of it. 
 
4. What areas of sports law interest you the most?   

As a sports law practitioner, it’s important I think to try and offer a breadth of sports law services. For me, the bulk of my practice and the stuff I really like doing is the regulatory work, and that involves stuff like disciplinary hearings, selection disputes, safeguarding prosecutions, regulatory prosecutions and similar, so I spend a lot of my time doing that. But I also love the sports commercial work that I do, and that’s similarly a big part of my practice.
 
5. What is your proudest professional achievement so far?  

There are a number of cases that I’m very proud of having been a part of. I’ve represented people and organisations in some really difficult circumstances, often where emotions are running high or there are significant sums at stake. But I guess my proudest professional achievement would be that I’ve created a practice that I really love. It’s a practice which is sufficiently varied to keep me on my toes, but where I know I’m going to work to do the cases I find interesting. That’s taken a lot of hard work, but it’s definitely been worth it.
  
6. Do you have any predictions for the future of sports law?  

I think that’s a difficult question. There are always trends in litigation and sports law I don’t think is any exception to that. I think that safeguarding disputes are a big area of growth, and that’s something that sports lawyers need to watch. And there’s obviously overlaps with issues of vicarious liability in abuse cases too. There’s also, I suppose, a point to raise about integrity in sport and integrity in sport being a kind of watchword. You’ll see in the newspapers that there is much more focus on things now like footballers who’ve been found to have breached gambling rules, clubs who have been found to have breached spending limits. All of those things which guarantee integrity in sport are now much more widely talked about in the media, and to that extent sports lawyers need to be offering services tailored to those integrity concerns.
 
7. What advice would you give to aspiring sports lawyers?  

I would say to recognise that sports law is more a sector than it is a discrete area of law. It’s an incredibly broad-church and you don’t necessarily need to start doing high-end commercial or corporate law in order to become a sports lawyer. The best way to go about becoming a sports lawyer is to engage with the full breadth of sports law work that’s available, be that regulatory, be that commercial, be that injury work, be that employment work, the list goes on. Sport has so many different legal angles, so aspiring sports lawyers should recognise that there is scope for a sports law practice that is much broader than how it may be portrayed.
 
8. Please can you describe a day in your life?   

Well, I mean, every day is different. A day in court for me is very different from being in chambers doing papers. If I’m in chambers then I’ll typically have a number of pieces of work from cases that are ongoing at any one time, and I’m often fielding questions from solicitors and picking up the phone to my clerks and other clients to make sure that other cases I’m involved in are ticking along. When I’m in court, really the rest of the world seems to stop and I can only focus on the matter in front me - I love that kind of singular focus. I suppose part of being a barrister is that dichotomy; some days you’ll be on your own in chambers working away, other days you’re in court projecting to a court room full of people. Really, it’s very difficult to describe, I suppose, a typical single day in my life given the variety of it, but I do really like that variety. 

[1] https://www.outertemple.com/barrister/samuel-cuthbert/