A passion for football helped this LA lawyer add a sports angle to her real estate finance practice

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A passion for football helped this LA lawyer…

A passion for football helped this LA lawyer add a sports angle to her real estate finance practice

July 1, 2026, 12:50 am CDT

Super Bowl LX. The FIFA World Cup 26. The 2025 NBA All-Star Game. For sports fans and athletes alike, these events represent the ultimate in competition and the realization of dreams. For Los Angeles lawyer Sonia Nayak, they’re all in a day’s work.

Nayak co-leads the Nixon Peabody team serving as counsel to the Bay Area Host Committee, the nonprofit organization responsible for supporting marquee events like tournaments and concerts throughout the San Francisco area. Besides serving as managing partner of the Los Angeles office, she co-heads the firm’s entertainment and sports team. But those aren’t her only jobs. For more than two decades, she’s maintained a real estate practice with a parallel roster of accomplishments in affordable housing and community development.

Incorporating sports into a practice focused on real estate finance isn’t the most typical path. Tell me how that happened.

My path was anything but linear. During law school, I had picked up a mini-concentration in tax law, but I thought, before I go out and spend another $30,000 to $50,000 on an LLM, I should probably put some practical application to this and just see what it means on a day-to-day basis. So instead of going straight into a firm, I took a job in the tax department of what was at the time known as AIG [the global insurance firm]. The work they were doing was sophisticated and fun, but within a year I realized that if I wanted to go to a law firm, the window for that was closing. I lined up some interviews and landed in the San Francisco office of Nixon Peabody, where I started doing tax credit work, which is a mixture of real estate finance and development, corporate law, securities, taxation, and also had a regulatory component. After eight years in the Bay Area, I moved down the coast to our Los Angeles office and continued to build my practice. Along the way, I also started doing a lot more commercial real estate transactions; my day-to-day practice is a melding of those two areas.

How did sports get in there?

Nixon Peabody started launching different ways that its lawyers could continue connecting with our clients. One of the initiatives was a “Let’s Talk” series, where women attorneys would speak with very successful women from our client base and across industries we serve. One of my colleagues represented the San Francisco 49ers, and during COVID, the firm held a Zoom event with the general counsel at the time, who was a woman.

And you are a massive 49ers fan!

Yes! From day one, I’ve never been afraid to fly my fan flag. I’m always here for anybody who wants to talk football. I had the opportunity to join the call, and that was my first meeting with the general counsel. A year and a half, two years later, the phone rang, and it was the general counsel. She said the team was looking to interview real estate counsel, and would I be interested in interviewing for the opportunity? I said yes, of course, and our team was selected for that real estate matter.

That’s amazing. But I know there’s more to the story …

Shortly thereafter—this is early 2023—the Bay Area Host Committee was being resurrected in part with the backing of the 49ers because Levi’s Stadium had been selected as one of the locations for the upcoming FIFA World Cup in 2026. There had been an iteration of the committee in 2016 when the stadium hosted the Super Bowl. A few years back, [the committee] was rebooted in a more intentional way, and I was asked if Nixon Peabody would be interested in interviewing to be its legal counsel to build the legal framework for regionwide mega events. These past two years advising the [committee]—and the opportunity to combine my work with my passion for sport—has been one of the highlights of my career.

How has that engagement evolved, and what would surprise people about this type of work?

We didn’t realize it at the time, but what began as preparation for the 2026 FIFA World Cup quickly evolved into much more. An opportunity materialized for the Bay Area to support the 2025 NBA All-Star Game, and of course there was Super Bowl LX. Doing those events back-to-back was extraordinary—I think we’ve had over 36 different attorneys involved in some way, shape or form. If you’re not involved in this type of work, I think what would surprise people the most is the diversity of practice areas that we pull from behind the scenes to help make these multiday, multivenue activations and mega events come to life.

How did you get interested in football?

Papa Nayak! He was and is a die-hard Rams fan, and when we were kids, he’d drag me and my sister and my mom to Anaheim Stadium to see them play. It was a way for us to bond as a family. Much to my dad’s chagrin, neither of his kids grew up to support the Rams. I fell in love with Joe Montana and the Niners of the ’80s and became a Niner girl, and my sister, who’s a few years younger than me, is a Cowboys fan.

Did your parents also influence your interest in law?

My parents are not lawyers, but my mom is in real estate investment, so that’s sort of where the seed was planted and where I learned real estate investing 101.

So you grew up clearly paying attention to what your mom was doing.

Oh, we were there—on-site with a hammer and nails! Look, unless you’re like a Madonna or Lady Gaga, very few people are born with a calling. But when I got to AIG, and my interest in tax and finance met real estate, it felt familiar. I understood at a very fundamental level what the business was and grew into it, and it became really interesting and engaging for me in a way that has created longevity in the practice and in the marketplace. Every deal is different—there’s always something new that you have to understand and figure out. It continues to challenge me on a daily basis.

Is there a through line for you, something that unites both your sports and real estate practices?

I think the through line, whether it’s mega events in sports or affordable housing, is economic development and community impact. Similarly, both also sit at the intersection of public and private partnerships—centered on navigating collaboration across key stakeholders across both sectors. That’s the theme, and that’s the sweet spot for me.

Can you share a “pinch me” moment from the Super Bowl?

One of the biggest “pinch me” moments was the Innovation Summit, a Bay Area Host Committee-organized event held in the days leading up to the Super Bowl. Designed as a creative way to raise capital, it brought together the worlds of tech, sports and investing in one room. Working not only with [the committee], the NFL, and regional municipal players on game-day components, but also with Google and YouTube as lead sponsors, was something I never saw on the horizon—a true example of the Bay Area’s spirit of collaborative public and private partnership.

The opportunity to be on the field right before one of the biggest sporting events in the world was an ultimate “pinch me” moment. I had an overwhelming sense of pride and gratitude for the work of our team and the opportunity to be able to do this type of work.

Jenny B. Davis is a journalism professor at Southern Methodist University, a fashion stylist and former practicing attorney. Her most recent book is Style Wise, a guide for aspiring fashion stylists.

A passion for football helped this LA lawyer add a sports angle to her real estate finance practice