New report: Legal firms chasing demand for marijuana-related advice

herb-2915337_640Pot is hot in the legal field. According to a new report, law firms are scrambling to keep up with demand from clients seeking advice regarding marijuana legalization.

In a special report, The Recorder at Law.com offers a wide-ranging update.

“There is just too much business to be had for these firms to ignore this,” Law.com reporter Cheryl Miller says in a 15-minute “Legal Speak” interview. “We have 33 states and the District of Columbia now where some form of cannabis is legal, and there’s such a demand for legal guidance from all these businesses that are sprouting up in response.”

Miller says clients dealing in areas such as real estate and employment law need legal advice to keep up with the rapidly changing marijuana market.

The federal-state conflict remains a major issue, she cautions. Banking regulation or cross-border travel particularly into Canada are examples of problem areas.

But firms such as Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Bradley Arant Boult Cummings are encountering high demand.

Miller says, “These lawyers are finding that it’s a natural outgrowth of strong employment practice, a strong real estate practice or a strong transactions practice or a strong litigation practice, and they’re having their existing clients come to them, and that leads to more business down the line.”

California marijuana retailer sued by former chief financial officer

Image: MedMen Chief Executive Adam Bierman as reported by Los Angeles Times. Photo Credit:  Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times.

Image: MedMen Chief Executive Adam Bierman as reported by Los Angeles Times. Photo Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times.

MedMen, a major marijuana industry operator in California with 1,243 employees, faces a lawsuit by its former chief financial officer, the L.A. Times reports.

“As California’s marijuana industry works to project an image of mainstream respectability, one of its best-known companies has come under attack by a former insider,” the newspaper reports.

MedMen Enterprises Inc. is trying to bring pot sales into the mainstream by providing sleek, comfortable stores in high-profile locations, and its strategy often is said to emulate the Apple store model.

The marijuana retailer is being sued by its former chief financial officer, James Parker, “who alleges the Culver City firm forced him out for objecting to a variety of alleged misdeeds at the company, whose stock became publicly traded last year.” A MedMen official denies the allegations.

Parker’s suit was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court following his departure from the firm on Nov. 5.

“After earlier rounds of private funding, MedMen went public last May through a reverse takeover — MedMen bought an existing Canadian public company — that enabled MedMen’s stock to be listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange,” the L.A. Times reports. “Although California and more than two dozen other states allow medicinal or adult recreational use of marijuana, cannabis remains illegal under U.S. federal law and thus the major U.S. stock exchanges will not list cannabis firms that operate in the United States.”

Courts Monitor publisher thinks that the newly emerging cannabis industry can learn a thing or two from the alcohol industry

Sara Corcoran is correspondent, contributing editor, and founding publisher of the National Courts Monitor & California Courts Monitor.

Sara Corcoran is a correspondent, contributing editor, and founding publisher of the National Courts Monitor & California Courts Monitor.

Sara Corcoran, the Courts Monitor publisher, thinks that the newly emerging cannabis industry can learn a thing or two from the alcohol industry. For example, as the repeal of alcohol prohibition turns 85 years old, the feuds between the “beer and wine” crowd and the “distilled spirits” companies could easily be repeated as cannabis regulation takes shape amid conflicted industry sectors. She is published at CityWatch LA, the regionally prominent Los Angeles-based opinion-and-politics website here.
 

Judge: Florida’s ban on smokable medical marijuana is unconstitutional

 

Photo credit: Orlando Weekly, 5/2/18

Photo credit: Orlando Weekly, 5/2/18

A state-imposed ban on smokable medical marijuana is unconstitutional, a Florida judge has ruled.

Leon County circuit court Judge Karen Gievers on June 5 upheld her May 25 ruling, ending a stay in this back-and-forth dispute.

“The state’s Department of Health had filed an appeal of Gievers’ original ruling, which automatically put it on hold,” The Associated Press reported. “Even with the stay being lifted, smokable medical marijuana will not immediately be available for sale at treatment centers.  That’s because the Department of Health must come up with rules for cultivation and distribution, which could take several months.”

Orlando Weekly noted that an appeals court had temporarily blocked a Tampa businessman from growing marijuana as he sought to prevent a relapse of lung cancer. The 1st District Court of Appeal had reinstated a stay of Gievers’s May 25 ruling. The circuit court’s ruling had cleared Joe Redner to grow his own marijuana for a treatment known as “juicing,” Orlando Weekly reported.

 

RICO law used to target marijuana businesses

herb-2915337_640An anti-mobster law, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, has emerged as a tool to fight marijuana-related businesses, including a case in Massachusetts citing “pungent odors” caused by consumption of the substance, among other negative effects.

Bloomberg reports, “While pot remains illegal under federal law, Massachusetts voters approved medical marijuana consumption in 2012 and recreational use in 2016; the latter will kick in next year. The drug is legal for at least one of the two purposes in 29 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam. But that doesn’t mean everybody wants a weed business next door. That’s why the burgeoning $6 billion marijuana business in the U.S. should view the RICO suits as serious threats, says Sean O’Connor, faculty director of the Cannabis Law and Policy Project at the University of Washington School of Law. Even if all the litigation fails, he says, ‘it could have its intended impact.’

“A lawsuit against Healthy Pharms in Cambridge, Mass., argues the company “would operate in flagrant disregard of the federal law that categorizes cannabis as a controlled substance every bit as illegal as heroin or cocaine.”

A similar lawsuit, a nearly 3-year-old suit in Colorado, is scheduled to go to trial in July, reports Marijuana Business Daily.

“This is an existential threat to the industry,” said Brian Barnes, an attorney with Cooper & Kirk law firm, according to the MBD.

Valerio Romano, an attorney for one of the Massachusetts defendants, said “the real impact of RICO suits could be to simply scare entrepreneurs into quitting the marijuana business.”

Will Pot + RICO Challenge State’s Federalist Trend?

Marijuana plants grow at LifeLine Labs in Cottage Grove, Minn., in 2015. (Jim Mone/Associated Press)

Marijuana plants grow at LifeLine Labs in Cottage Grove, Minn., in 2015. (Jim Mone/Associated Press)

Writing in The Washington Post, legal commentator Jonathan H. Adler outlines both the context and challenges facing “legal” marijuana now that a law targeting gangsters is being used for civil resistance to state pot reforms. We’ve reported before that the federal 10th Circuit court has taken a stand and it’s significant.
 
Adler outlines the federal context, including how the U.S. Congress has linked marijuana to funding legislation, before going into the looming challenges.
 
He notes that “… a bigger potential threat [to state legalization efforts] comes from the fact that marijuana possession and distribution are predicate offenses under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). This means that those who produce or sell marijuana are potentially subject to civil RICO suits, whether or not such activities are legal under state law. So held the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit earlier this year. A federal judge once described RICO as “the monster that ate jurisprudence.” Barring real reform at the federal level, it could be the monster that ate marijuana federalism, too. Here again, an appropriations rider is insufficient.

 
Adler is arguing that the RICO use is a threat to the “federalism” model for state control. 
 
Opinion | Will marijuana make federalism go up in smoke?

New Civil Actions Coming For Marijuana Water Use

As reported 8/29/15 in the Sacromento Bee, "California regulators undertake unique experiment to govern water use for marijuana. Video by Paul Kitagaki Jr."

As reported 8/29/15 in the Sacromento Bee, “California regulators undertake unique experiment to govern water use for marijuana. Video by Paul Kitagaki Jr.”

You probably saw this coming: The state of California is using civil lawsuits to make environmental cases against legal marijuana growers, especially when it come to water use during the state’s history making drought.
 
Many growers claim this is just sour grapes over the legalization of some uses of marijuana, while other growers are embracing the regulation. It makes for interesting cop stories, especially for those trying to understand how police raids are part of civil litigation. And you can catch up on the via The Sacramento Bee story here:California takes new approach on water regulation for pot farms