Creative Artists Agency believed it had an absolute right to fire Ben Dogra, who formerly oversaw the talent agency\u2019s football division, for outrageous behavior. Not only did an arbitrator conclude that CAA was the one at fault under an employment agreement, but CAA has now failed in keeping an arbitrator\u2019s $15 million award from becoming public. Nevertheless, as Hollywood agents are beginning to gossip about the Dogra case, CAA is continuing its bid to keep confidential all that happened. For an industry that enjoys the enormous privacy afforded by alternative dispute resolution, a Missouri federal judge is next set to determine whether a star agent has the right to tell everyone that CAA fired him without cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dogra, who represents such NFL stars as Adrian Peterson, Robert Griffin III, and A.J. Green, joined CAA Sports in 2006. His employment agreement was later renewed, and he was paid a base salary of $3.6 million, a guaranteed bonus of $900K, and 60 percent of residual net income from the football division, where he worked in conjunction with another giant in the football world: Tom Condon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In November 2014, Dogra was told at a meeting that he was being fired. At the time, he didn\u2019t get reasons for his termination. It certainly mattered. Under his contract, if he was fired with cause, he was required to pay fees totaling $9 million to CAA. If he was terminated without cause, he\u2019d have to refund CAA his base salary and bonuses for that year but would retain the revenue that he was responsible generating for the agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After he was fired, others were told various things about Dogra\u2019s departure. For example, Dante Fowler Jr., a defensive end who now plays for the Los Angeles Rams, was allegedly told that Dogra\u2019s firing had to do with drugs. The players\u2019 union, meanwhile, was told that CAA had \u201cno choice\u201d but to fire him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once the case went to arbitration, CAA detailed why it had let Dogra go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to the agency, Dogra failed to oversee the football division in conjunction with Condon and he had sent menacing and profane messages to CAA employees, the media and NFL team executives. One example given was how Dogra allegedly attempted to \u201cblackmail\u201d a Minnesota Vikings executive in order to secure Adrian Peterson\u2019s release. (At that time, the team wouldn\u2019t play Peterson, one of the best running backs in NFL history, after a suspension related to child abuse.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nevertheless, in an arbitration award, M. David Vaughn concluded that while Dogra\u2019s communications were certainly \u201cvitriolic,\u201d CAA failed to show that clients or league executives were refusing to deal with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe same cannot be said about Dogra\u2019s communications during the period to and about his fellow CAA employees,\u201d continued the arbitrator. \u201cWhile the agent business is a full contact sport, and while Dogra\u2019s superiors, peers and subordinates all knew (and largely tolerated) his abusive and erratic manner of operating the cited communications could not but have substantial adverse \u2013 and perhaps irreversible \u2013 impact on Dogra\u2019s ability to deal with the targets of his communications going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why CAA didn\u2019t win the case was the arbitrator\u2019s next conclusion that the agency had failed as contractually required to give him notice and the opportunity to cure his misbehavior. The arbitrator was also persuaded that Dogra worked with Condon even if the relationship was \u201cdamaged.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vaughn ruled that CAA failed to live up to obligations to pay Dogra\u2019s share of revenue, although the arbitrator also gave CAA some good wins. For instance, Vaughn determined Dogra wasn\u2019t entitled to receive direct commissions from players and also rejected the agent\u2019s defamation claims because they were premised on hearsay or could be interpreted to have non-defamatory meaning. Additionally, the arbitrator rejected Dogra\u2019s bid for $13 million in \u201cexpectation damages\u201d based on what the agent felt was coming to him had he not been let go in the way he was. Dogra\u2019s contention that he \u201cowned\u201d the football division and merely licensed the rights to the business to CAA also failed to persuade the judge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In follow-up decisions, the arbitrator dealt with the scope of what was owed. Dogra ultimately became the beneficiary of a $12.5 million decision and interest, which Dogra claims to be worth $2.35 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The money is obviously big (and partly a function of how the pot was divided and who held onto the pot given certain clients staying with CAA and other clients following Dogra out the door), but the issue of confidentiality would soon rise to be one of the most important issues of consideration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dogra wanted Vaughn to allow him to put out a press release about the result. The agent maintained that since it was reported that he was fired \u201cfor cause,\u201d he should get an opportunity to make a public declaration that he was fired without cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The arbitrator looked at the employment contract, which provided that \u201call arbitration will be confidential,\u201d and held that the term \u201carbitration\u201d was ambiguous here in that it could just mean the proceedings and hearing but not the award. Ultimately, though, Vaughn decided to neither endorse nor reject Dogra\u2019s request to make a statement. The arbitrator didn\u2019t think he had jurisdiction on this issue. When Dogra demanded reconsideration, CAA pointed to Vaughn\u2019s lack of jurisdiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What happened next is how, to CAA\u2019s chagrin, the matter became public anyway leading to this story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CAA filed a lawsuit in Missouri in an effort to vacate the arbitrator\u2019s award. But the agency attempted to do it as quietly as possible by immediately sealing its court documents. The agency told the judge that sealing was warranted to \u201cprotect its rights under the Federal Arbitration Act while simultaneously respecting the agreed confidentiality of the arbitration provisions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dogra then filed counterclaims and opposed the sealing. And with a thumb in CAA\u2019s eyes, he publicly lodged the arbitrator\u2019s opinions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CAA is blasting what it sees as a \u201clack of respect for the legal process\u2026 by deliberately disclosing confidential information to the public.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Wednesday, despite previously rallying behind the arbitrator\u2019s decision that there was no jurisdiction to decide the issue of whether Dogra was free to tell the world about his success, CAA took the position that \u201cany dispute over the confidentiality of the arbitration Awards at issue in this matter are subject to mandatory arbitration pursuant to the employment agreement between Dogra and CAA.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Menacing, profane emails and texts weren’t enough for CAA to show it had cause to terminate Ben Dogra. Despite CAA’s best efforts to keep the matter confidential, what happened in arbitration doesn’t stay in arbitration. Creative Artists Agency believed it had an absolute right to fire Ben Dogra, who formerly oversaw the talent agency\u2019s football […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43723,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,6,128],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bryan-j-freedman","category-sports","category-the-hollywood-reporter"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n