Ellen Zavian

 ( 1963 Births ) 

After graduating from law school, Zavian joined a Senior Management Group LLC law firm based near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and run by sports agent, Brett Senior, where she represented professional athletes as their attorney/agent. Two years later, Zavian launched her own practice.

In 1990, at the age of 26, Zavian became the first female attorney/agent representing players and coaches in the NFL.

Her first client was John Booty, of the New York Jets and later the Washington Redskins and Phoenix Cardinals. Nearly twenty years later, Zavian's final professional football player client was Troy Brown, MVP of the New England Patriots. Throughout her career, Zavian also worked with Frank Reich, Steve Tasker, Erik McMillan and Tim Manoa, among many others.

Following several years of representing players and coaches, Zavian was then approached by United States women's national soccer team (USWNT) co-captains Julie Foudy and Carla Overbeck in late 1995 for help negotiating new contracts from the U.S. Soccer Federation for nine of the women soccer players, including Kristine Lilly and Mia Hamm. The terms of the contract stated that the women's soccer team would only receive a bonus if they won gold at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, while the men's soccer team contract stated they would receive an Olympic bonus if they won bronze, silver or gold. Zavian advised Foudy and her teammates to cross out the contested clauses and then faxed the revised documents back to the Federation which prompted a players’ lockout. Relying on her previous background with the National Football League Players Association’s 1987 NFL season players’ strike, Zavian and the U.S. women soccer players held out. By the early part of 1996, the Federation responded to the players’ requests agreeing that the women soccer team would receive bonuses if they won either gold, silver, or bronze at the Olympics. The collective bargaining agreement was also the first in women's sports to include a paid pregnancy leave clause. The agreements for two of the women soccer players who had small children also had a clause incorporating paid nannies.

By the early 2000s, Zavian found another group of players to represent namely those involved in skateboarding and breakdancing. She helped create the X Games and Gravity Games extreme athletes (Skateboarding, BMX’ers and Inline skates) and the Breakdancing player associations. Throughout her career, Zavian has represented a range of athletes from professional football players, soccer and softball players to skateboarders and break-dancers. Zavian has served as the Founding Executive Director of the Women's National Team Players Association The Women's National Team Softball Association, The United Professional Skateboarder Association (UPSA). She also created the United Breakin Association, a global association for competitive break dancers, and she was appointed to the USA Dance task force which ultimately sought and obtained approval from the International Olympic Committee to recognized break dancing in the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Zavian was appointed by FIFA to the FIFA Pro Bono Counsel group in 2019, SafeSport International Board of Trustee in 2021, FIFPRO DEI Committee in 2022 and the Maryland Racing Commission.

In 2022, Zavian became the first General Counsel for USA Lacrosse, the governing body of lacrosse in the United States.

In addition, she also was a columnist for Fairchild's Branding magazine, covering the sports marketing, Pro Football Weekly, focusing on the business of the Pro Football Weekly and Bass Resource reporting on women.

She is Editor-in-chief for Esports and the Law and My Legal Bookie both of which focus on the legal issues within esports and Gambling. In 2020, she became a Contributing Author in esports coverage for The Washington Post. Other writings and quotes of hers have appeared in Forbes, Sports Illustrated, The Guardian, Association of Corporate Counsel, and Sports Law Expert.

She has also made appearances on CNN, C-SPAN, and NPR.