Mr. Daniel B. Adams has been an attorney with Ropes & Gray since 2004 and is in counsel with the sports law group, which is based in Boston. His practice focuses primarily on transactional matters, representing private equity firms and sports-related strategic investors in the structuring and negotiation of leveraged buyouts, cross-border acquisitions and other investments. He also advises on corporate governance and other general corporate matters. As a member of the sports law group, Mr. Adams negotiates the employment, sponsorship, media and speaking arrangements for various collegiate and professional coaches, administrators and broadcasters such as Tony Dungy, Johnny Dawkins and Ed Cooley. He also negotiates sponsorship, licensing, joint venture, broadcast and media rights and sports venue-leasing transactions for professional leagues, teams, conferences and athletic associations. Mr. Adams represents the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the NCAA, New Balance and various professional sports teams and schools’ athletic departments. Mr. Adams serves as a board member of the Massachusetts Amateur Sports Foundation, Inc., which operates the Bay State Summer and Winter Games. He is also a board member of the East Greenbush Miracle League, Inc., which provides opportunities in athletics for individuals with special needs. Born and raised in East Greenbush, he is the third child of Burke and Carol Adams, and brother to Brian, Scott, Julie and Jaime Adams. 

At Columbia, Mr. Adams stood out for many reasons. Intelligent, competitive, diligent and gregarious, and respected by his classmates and faculty, he is still remembered as a friend to all who knew him. Setting his ambitions high, Mr. Adams thrived at Boston College, where he earned a B.A. in economics and philosophy in 2000 with magna cum laude honors. While an undergraduate, he distinguished himself as well by serving as the first student CEO of Boston College Student Agency, a conglomeration of business units. During the summers, he commuted weekly between East Greenbush—to work as a lifeguard, aquatics director, and town employee—and Boston to manage his responsibilities on campus. He also found time to escort a young local resident with a physical disability around the city. Ironically, a rare moment of ambivalence would lead to a landmark graduate school experience. Intrigued by the prospect of attending law school at North Carolina, Mr. Adams also considered pursuing a master’s at the Harvard Business School. The solution was simple: negotiate with the Deans of each school to enter both programs. To say he succeeded would be an understatement; indeed, in 2001, Mr. Adams became the first student to co-attend both schools, attending them in alternate years. In 2004, he earned an MBA from Harvard and a JD from North Carolina. A dean of students remarked to the young man’s proud parents, “Dan is the hardest working student I’ve ever seen in my entire career.” Yet Mr. Adams’s greatest challenge— a diagnosis of aplastic anemia, a condition that halts the production of blood cells—would soon follow. His dire need for a bone marrow transplant inspired an outpouring of support from the community through the development of the Dan Adams Bone Marrow Registry, an event that became the largest onetime donation program in the history of the Bone Marrow Collection program. 

Inspiration leading to transformation has been a theme throughout this man’s remarkable life. Mr. Adams has dedicated himself to the Miracle League in his hometown. Inspired by his beloved sister, Jaime, who is confined to a wheelchair by Rett Syndrome, he worked with the East Greenbush community in 2009 to transform a plot of land into the Jaime M. Adams Field (JMAF). A host site to special needs children and adults, this facility is the only one of its kind in the nation to be designed for baseball, football, soccer, and track and field, complete with a special rubberized surface for teams from the Capital Region Miracle League.