Port Rail: Helping those I didn’t know needed help | 4D
Business&Money
S U N D A Y , J U N E 15 , 2014
Survey: Millenials feel overwhelmed with debt
Four in 10 members of the millennial generation said they felt overwhelmed by debt, with more than half reporting they were living paycheck to paycheck, according to poll results released last week. Most of the respondents in the Wells Fargo Millennial Study said the Great Recession taught them that they needed to start saving for retirement, but 45 percent said they had not yet begun. Although 56 percent said they were living paycheck to paycheck, nearly seven in 10 said they felt better off fi nancially than other members of their generation and expected their standard of living before they retired to be better than that of their parents. The 40 percent who described their debt as overwhelming was much higher than the 23 percent of respondents from the older baby-boom generation who said they felt that way, according to the poll.
Overall motorcycle thefts decline; Harley thefts up
Motorcycle thefts are on the decline, and of five major brands, only Harley-Davidson owners saw an uptick in the number of stolen bikes in 2013, new data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau show. It’s hard to say why more Harleys continue to be stolen, but some speculate the riders are too trusting — leaving their bikes unlocked and unattended because most fellow riders won’t mess with them. Still, there were 3,907 HarleyDavidsons stolen in the U.S. last year, up 4 percent from 2012, while the percentage of stolen Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki and Suzuki motorcycles fell 2.1 percent (Kawasaki) to 9.1 percent (Suzuki), according to data from the trade association based in Des Plaines, Ill. Overall, there were 45,367 motorcycle thefts reported in the U.S. in 2013, down 1.5 percent, even as bike sales increased.
GoPro releases details of its upcoming IPO
GoPro Inc. could be valued at nearly $3 billion in its upcoming initial public offering, and its employees will immediately share in the bounty. The action-camera company revised its public fi ling with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week to fi ll in blanks left when the document was originally released. The biggest addition is details of the actual offering: GoPro seeks to sell 17.8 million shares in a price range of $21 to $24 a share, which would raise $427.2 million at a valuation of $2.96 billion at the high end. GoPro sells durable, small cameras that are typically connected to a person or object to record action. They are popular for sports such as skiing and snowboarding, and have been commonly attached to vehicles or drones to capture live video.
Group seeks to delay Google’s driverless cars
A consumer group wants the California Department of Motor Vehicles to slow Google Inc.’s rush to get driverless cars on the road. Consumer Watchdog said the state’s regulations don’t allow enough time to test the selfdriving cars before allowing them on California streets and highways. The state agency has regulations that take effect Sept. 16 governing the testing of driverless cars on California highways. The main rules are that the manufacturer must use specially trained test drivers who sit in the driver’s seat and can take control of the vehicle, that any accidents or situation in which the autonomous technology disengages during operation must be reported to the DMV, and that the manufacturer is required to maintain $5 million in insurance or surety bonds.
WWW.TUSCALOOSANEWS.COM
From court to
courtroom Field of sports law grows with athletic industry By Patrick Rupinski Business Editor
A
couple years ago, Gene Marsh had about 30 law school students in his sports law class at the University of Alabama. This past spring semester, Marsh, a professor emeritus of law, had 57 students in the elective class. The increased interest in sports law is part of a national trend not only in law schools but also in law fi rms, more of which are including it as part of their practices. T hat rising interest occurred partly because of the economic downturn several years ago, Marsh said. Law fi rms, like many businesses, took a hit during the Great Recession and were looking for more business, so they added more services, he said. The other part of sports law ’s g row t h recog ni zes sports as a big business that continues to grow and become more complex. Sports law includes a good dose of labor law, but it also covers such things as intellectual property rights, gender equality issues and even liability issues related to injuries, behavior and harassment, said Marsh, an attorney specializing in sports law with the Birmingham office of Jackson Lewis, a New York-based law fi rm specializing in labor and employment law. The growth in sports law was seen last month when about 900 people attended the Sports Lawyers Association’s 40th annual conference in Chicago. Lloyd E. Shefsky, a founder of the association, said that when the group started in 1975, it had five members, whose main interest was representing the budding group of sports agents who wanted to negotiate contracts for professional athletes. “And really, none of those lawyers knew anything” about sports law, Shefsky said at the conference. The evolution of sports law is something that Marsh has seen fi rsthand. Marsh, a Tuscaloosa resident, was not one of the early attorneys in sports law. He taught contract law at UA for
20 years and did not get actively involved in sports law u nt i l 1 9 9 6 , when he became UA’s facult y athletic represent a Gene Marsh tive. That led is a profesto his involvesor at the ment in the University Southeastern of Alabama Conference School of a nd NCA A , Law. the national governing body for collegiate athletics. He served on the NCA A’s Committee of Infractions from 1999 to 2008 and is a past chairman of the NCA A Division 1 Committee of Infractions. During that time, professional players’ and coaches’ salaries soared, as did the cost and competition for broadcast rights for games of both professional and top collegiate teams. Sports contracts became bigger and more complex. Recent developments at the collegiate level could open even more venues for attorneys in sports law, particularly as the clamor grows for increased compensation for college athletes, whose performances on the field often earn big bucks for their schools. In March, a National Labor Relations Board official ruled that scholarship football players at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., were employees of the university and thus could form a union. And later this month, a federal judge will hear arguments in an antitrust class action against the NCAA. Marsh said while more attorneys might move into sports law, “hanging out a shingle advertising a sports law practice does not guarantee expertise.” He also said that while more UA law school students are interested in his sports law class, there is no guarantee that any of them will work, let alone specialize, in sports law in the future. SEE SPORTS | 3D
STAFF ILLUSTRATION | ANTHONY BRATINA
-TALK
SECTION D
Investors regaining faith in emerging markets By Steve Rothwell
The Associated Press
NEW YORK | Soccer fans are focused on Brazil and the World Cup, but investors have been entranced by that nation’s stock market for months. Brazil has company. From Sao Paulo to Mumbai, India, investors are regaining their faith in emerging markets this year. It’s a big shift from 2013, when investment in those markets dried up because of worries about their slowing economic growth. It got so tough
that five big developing markets — Brazil, South Africa, India, Indonesia and Turkey — were dubbed the “Fragile Five” by analysts at Morgan Stanley. Now those countries are much more appealing to investors. Some have taken actions to strengthen their economies. Others have gone through political changes that have bolstered investor confidence. At the same time, slower growth in the U.S. has made investing overseas more alluring. “These countries have done some SEE M ARKETS | 3D
A woman counts U.S. dollars and Turkish lira at a currency exchange office in Istanbul, Turkey. Investors are finding more to like about stocks in emerging markets this year. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS