As a corporate and transactional attorney focused mostly on cannabis, I see my fair share of financing documents and transactions involving cannabis operators. It’s no secret many cannabis businesses can’t get bank accounts or loans or lines of credit from financial institutions because of the Bank Secrecy Act and federal anti-money laundering laws — despite
If you follow state-by-state legal cannabis legalization, you’re aware that despite the federal illegality of cannabis, certain federal agencies police the cannabis industry like they do any other legal industry. For example, the NLRB has been known to go after cannabis companies engaged in hostile workplace conduct and the Department of Treasury contemplates banking services to
As most of us know, bankruptcy is just not an option for the cannabis industry or those even affiliated with it. To date, courts have generally ruled that debtors who work in the cannabis industry or derive meaningful income from cannabis activity (directly or indirectly) cannot use bankruptcy. This is in response to the U.S.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the “The Top 12 Alternative Dispute Resolution Strategies” webinar last week. We received a ton of questions on a lot of really interesting topics, and we will be spending the next few weeks addressing those we couldn’t fully get to during the one-hour period. We received a
We’ve written many times about how commercial leases to cannabis tenants are their own beasts. Generic leases don’t ever the job done. And, in California, as bad as some landlords want to rely solely on AIR and CAR forms, we generally caution landlords to have a customized lease arrangement when dealing with a cannabis tenant.
In a prior post I discussed some general insurance issues for cannabis business owners to consider. Today we’ll take a deep dive into Washington State insurance for cannabis businesses. As is the case with most emerging industries, the pace of marijuana business continues to outstrip the development of ancillary but crucial services (see California Approves
Banking, intellectual property, food and beverage (and cosmetics), international trade, domestic trade, state laws, ag production contracts, etc., etc. When it comes to industrial hemp, the 2018 Farm Bill upended all of these things. Our cannabis business lawyers have been busy advising a large number of new hemp and hemp-CBD businesses getting in on the
We have spilled a lot of ink on this blog related to the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized hemp at the federal level. It’s huge news. And there are so many ramifications, from food law to trademarks to the financial services environment. This blog post is going to cover financial institutions and hemp at about
Yesterday proved to be a wild day, featuring Jeff Sessions single-handedly demolishing the federal government’s former cannabis enforcement framework. Now that 24 hours have passed since the news came out, we have had a chance to refine our analysis of the Department of Justice’s move. Reactions in the media have ranged from treating the Sessions
It’s finally happening — Attorney General Jeff Sessions will, today, rescind the 2013 Cole Memo regarding federal enforcement in states that legalized cannabis. The Cole Memo, which came on the heels of marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington back in 2012, set forth the Obama administration’s enforcement policies regarding state-legal marijuana. It set out eight
