About this episode

Philip Sheng discusses the intricacies of NIL contracts and athlete ownership from a legal perspective.

What an attorney who reviews NIL deals sees in the contracts, and what college athletes may be signing away. Philip Sheng is an attorney at Venable LLP, a national firm of roughly 900 lawyers, where he works in the intellectual property group and the sports law practice. His focus is college NIL, the right of publicity, and college eligibility: who owns a person’s name, image, and likeness, and what they give up when they sign. This is the on-the-ground legal view of NIL. For the full breakdown of how the system works, start with The NIL Hub , NIL Rules in 2026 , and NIL Pros and Cons . This episode is narrower. It is what a practicing attorney sees inside the deals themselves. Eric Kasimov talks with Sheng about NIL as both a legal and an athlete-centered issue. They get into whether NIL is really athlete compensation, intellectual property, or both, and why the issue was known as the right of publicity long before college sports made it a household term. Sheng has lived the landscape from several sides. He played tennis at Stanford, competed as an ATP-ranked professional, and now has children navigating college athletics, including Division I basketball and tennis. Topics NIL…

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