Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

Welcome to the first blog in our AI and Outsourcing series, where we explore the disruptive and transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on outsourcing and managed services transactions.

While morals clauses have long been common in athlete endorsement agreements, their importance to sponsorship agreements between teams and sponsors is mounting as brands seek greater protection against reputational harm tied to their association with a team. In the team sponsorship context, however, the analysis will differ.

Please join partner Marie Davy and of counsel Emily Lowe on Thursday, April 30, 2026 from 12:00 to 1:00 pm ET for a discussion on current issues and key contractual provisions in global distribution agreements. Topics will include territory and exclusivity, compliance, and intellectual property protection.

Sports sponsorship agreements were once relatively straightforward: brand visibility in exchange for fees. This is no longer the case. Today, most meaningful sponsorships involve significant data components, whether fan engagement platforms, digital activations, or, increasingly, AI-driven analytics. As a result, these agreements are starting to look much more like technology and data contracts.

As the sports industry looks ahead to 2026, sponsorship agreements are becoming more complex, more strategic, and more closely scrutinized. We sat down with Doneld “Don” Shelkey, a leading sports sponsorship and commercial agreements lawyer at our firm, to discuss what he’s seeing in the market and what sponsors and rights holders should be thinking about now.

The European Parliament recently published a report (the Report) on the interplay between several key EU digital regulations to assess overlap and gaps and highlight the regulatory complexity that these different regimes have collectively imposed on businesses.

Morgan Lewis’s technology, outsourcing, and commercial contract team, along with Boston Consulting Group, recently hosted a roundtable dinner in London, during which senior stakeholders from technology suppliers and large businesses discussed how the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting offshoring and outsourcing.

The European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs) published on November 18, 2025 a list of 19 critical information and communications technology (ICT) third-party providers (CTPP) that will be subject to direct oversight under the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). The list includes hyperscale cloud providers, data center providers, infrastructure and network providers, and providers of financial services-specific technology.

Open-source software (OSS), by its nature, is sometimes overlooked as part of technology transactions. OSS is often a key aspect of a business’s software ecosystem, whether it is used in internal systems or forms a fundamental part of solutions that are sold to customers or used to provide services to customers; however, OSS often sits in the background, as a foundation of a software solution, and can therefore go unconsidered by those not familiar with its uses, benefits, and risks.

In a recent LawFlash, a team of Morgan Lewis lawyers discussed President Donald Trump’s July 24, 2025 executive order titled Saving College Sports. This order, which follows recent significant changes to compensation rules and limitations in the collegiate sports landscape, introduces certain guardrails intended to maintain competition and parity within intercollegiate athletics.