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EDITOR’S RAMBLE 🗣

This summer, the law firm CMS helped protect a unicorn 🦄

That unicorn was Finnie, the official mascot of the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games.

I’m suuuper excited to share that for today’s newsletter, we’re finding out what an “official legal partner” actually does.

I love working with CMS (though I’m biased – I trained and qualified there). But the firm’s lawyers really gave us a lot of useful insights for this piece. So I hope it’s useful.

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🦄 What CMS did behind the scenes at the Commonwealth Games (including protecting a unicorn)

What’s going on here?

This summer, Glasgow hosted the Commonwealth Games, which ran from 23 July to 2 August. The organisation that made it happen was Glasgow 2026 Ltd, the organising company set up for the job.

CMS was the Games’ official (and only) legal partner, advising Glasgow 2026 Ltd on the legal work needed to put the whole thing together. And it all had to happen fast.

Glasgow only stepped in as host after the original host, the Australian state of Victoria, withdrew, so the organisers had around 18 months for an event that usually takes four or five years to plan.

We spoke to CMS’s Glasgow team about what that work looked like from the inside.

What actually is an “official legal partner”?

Being the official legal partner was “much more than putting a logo on an event’s sponsorship page”, the CMS team told us.

The firm’s job was to prepare and negotiate the contracts the organising company needed to stage the event. That’s things like venue hire, supplier deals, and agreements with specialist delivery partners like Trivandi – they ran the temporary venue set-up and venue operations.

To help with that work, CMS sent two of its lawyers, Scott Moir and Angus Niven, on secondment to work full-time inside the organising company’s legal team from the start of the relationship. Both come from CMS’s Strategic Secondment Unit, a team whose whole job is working inside clients’ businesses.

Why was Glasgow 2026 not like a regular client?

For CMS, advising Glasgow 2026 came with three particular challenges.

⏰ The deadline was fixed. On a lot of corporate deals, the timetable can slip if the parties need more time. The Commonwealth Games couldn’t – everyone knew the date of the opening ceremony. So CMS’s advice had to be, in the firm’s words, “pragmatic, commercial and focused on enabling delivery”. In practice, that meant telling the client which risks mattered most, and how to handle them, so preparations kept moving.

🔍 Private funding didn’t mean less public attention. The Games were privately funded through Commonwealth Sport (the organisation that runs the Commonwealth Games) and other sponsors. But it was still a big public event, and the people of Glasgow felt a sense of involvement in it. So as well as asking whether something was legally sound, CMS helped the organisers think about how the public would feel about it.

📦 The end had to be planned from the start. The organising company was set up for a single Commonwealth Games and would close once its work was finished. So, while the venue and supplier contracts were still being agreed, a lot of time went into negotiating what would happen after the event. Venues had to go back to their owners, kit had to be returned or passed on, and any outstanding bills had to be settled. Imagine a forklift dents the velodrome track while the temporary seating is being taken down. The venue hire agreement should already say who pays to fix it, how quickly, and whether the venue can hold back some of the organisers’ money until it’s done.

What did CMS’s work actually involve?

CMS advised on the contracts needed to stage the Games, how to handle changes to those plans and how to protect the event’s brand.

🏟️ Making responsibilities clear in contracts. CMS drafted and negotiated venue hire, supplier and operational agreements. On the other side of the table were the people who own and run the venues, such as Glasgow Life, the charity that runs Tollcross, Scotstoun and the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome for the city, and the suppliers delivering kit and services.

These contracts set out who would do what, by when, and who would be responsible if something went wrong. For CMS, that is what commercial law often comes down to – “turning a project plan into a workable set of rights, obligations, deadlines and risk allocations”. A venue agreement, for example, might need to specify when organisers could enter the building to start preparing it, rather than simply when spectators would arrive. If you get that wrong, the seating crew turns up to a locked building. The legal work helped make sure the organisers had the access and services they needed to deliver their plans.

🦄 Protecting the Games’ brand. CMS’s trade mark team supported the launch of Finnie, the official mascot – a unicorn whose horn was inspired by the traffic cone that famously sits on Glasgow’s Duke of Wellington statue. 👇

A recognisable mascot is also valuable. Fans buy official merchandise, and Finnie on a T-shirt tells them it’s the official thing. Trade marks protect branding like names and images, which gives the owner grounds to stop people using it without permission.

CMS’s IP team supported searches for misuse of Commonwealth Games branding and potential ambush marketing (where a business tries to suggest a connection with an event without being an official sponsor). That work helps protect the value of being an authorised seller or sponsor, because those businesses have paid for a connection that others might try to claim for free.

Sponsors care about this a lot. Glasgow 2026’s official soft drinks partner was Coca-Cola, for example. A deal like that usually buys exclusivity, so no rival drinks brand can sponsor the Games too. But exclusivity only works if the contract is precise. As CMS senior associate Kimberley Cross and trainee Josh Campbell explained in this article, it has to pin down the product category, where the deal applies, how long it lasts, what branding is allowed and any exceptions. If any of that is left vague, there’s a higher chance of disputes.

Which of CMS’s practice areas were most involved?

CMS’s Glasgow office led the work, pulling in specialists from across the firm. Here’s what each team deals with on an event like this.

CMS is a full-service firm, which means it has lawyers covering pretty much every area of law.

The Commonwealth Games show why that’s useful to a client. “Sports law” is really a label for an industry, not a separate area of law. In a sporting event like this, you can see how you need advice on staff, buildings, contracts and branding, often all at once.

CMS’s job was to pull those specialists together, so the organisers got one complete answer.

How did CMS’s role change as the Games got closer?

The firm told us its role was a mix of planning ahead and reacting to challenges – and that balance shifted as the opening ceremony approached.

🧭 Early on: getting the foundations right. The focus was on helping the organising company put the right contracts, governance and risk management in place. Governance is the set of rules on who can decide what, such as who can sign a contract.

⚡ Closer to the Games: answering questions fast. As the event approached, the work became more reactive. Operational questions came up quickly and needed prompt, practical answers.

🏅 During competition: being on hand. For the 11 days of competition, CMS’s job was to be available, understand the context and work closely with the in-house legal team, helping it deal with issues without slowing down delivery.

Angus Niven, one of the two CMS lawyers seconded to the organising company, told us what landed on the legal team’s desk.

Sponsors got in touch to check they were getting the “activations” (the fan-facing things a sponsor does at an event, like branded stands or giveaways) and the exposure they’d been promised. The legal team worked with the organisers’ sponsor relationship team to make sure every deal was delivered as agreed.

Then there was the workforce – 4,000 volunteers and many temporary staff joined for the Games, so, as Angus put it, “the workforce ballooned overnight”. That meant far more employment questions, many of which landed with the legal team, plus a huge amount of sensitive data to manage properly.

What did the trainees and junior lawyers actually do?

CMS’s trainees and junior lawyers worked on the documents needed to deliver the Games.

📝 They helped negotiate and draft “venue hire agreements”. These contracts set out how the organising company could use a venue and what each side was responsible for. Access dates are a good example of why the detail matters. The organisers need time inside each venue to build seating and set up broadcast kit before spectators arrive, so the contract has to give them it.

🗒️ They joined meetings and recorded follow-up actions. A meeting can end with some points agreed and others still unresolved. Writing down what happens next means nothing gets lost, whether that’s a clause to redraft or a question to put to the client.

🔍 They helped look for misuse of Games branding. Junior lawyers searched for possible ambush marketing and unauthorised use of Commonwealth Games branding. Anything they found went to the senior lawyers, who could decide whether to act, for example by asking a website to take a listing down.

What bigger trends does this work show?

💼 Sports work is becoming more commercial. CMS says sponsors that partner with major sporting events increasingly want evidence that their investment is worthwhile.

That could mean showing whether the partnership helps them reach fans and build interest in their products. Organisers also face more scrutiny now over sustainability, accessibility and how they use people’s data.

For aspiring lawyers, the lesson is to understand what the client wants to achieve before advising on the law. Imagine a drinks brand sponsoring the Games – it’ll want to see that its investment paid off. The Games organiser will also want the brand visible, but not in a way that makes the Games feel like one big advert. A good sponsorship contract gives both sides what they need – a balance of exposure for the sponsor and control for the organiser.

🌍 Experience from these Commonwealth Games can help the next host. Lessons from Glasgow’s contracts, brand protection and venue arrangements can inform preparations for future events, including Ahmedabad 2030. Glasgow 2026 designed its delivery model, including having CMS lawyers inside its team, as “a replicable framework for future hosts across the Commonwealth”. CMS has offices in India, so, as the firm put it, there’s “a natural opportunity to connect experience from Glasgow 2026 with future Games-related work where appropriate”. The contracts would still need to suit the next host’s laws and local circumstances, but the lawyers would have practical lessons to draw on, including which issues to address early and where responsibilities need to be particularly clear.

From the outside, the Commonwealth Games looked seamless. CMS told us much of that comes from legal work nobody sees – “before a venue opens, a mascot launches or a sponsor activates its rights, lawyers have usually helped work through contracts, permissions, intellectual property, risk allocation and stakeholder concerns.”

That’s the bit people underestimate. Large sporting events are “made up of hundreds of practical decisions where law, logistics, reputation and commercial judgement all meet”.

For 11 days in Glasgow this summer, hardly anyone watching gave a second thought to contracts, trade marks or venue handbacks. That was the sign CMS’s lawyers had done their job – when the legal work goes well for an event like this, nobody notices it.