They say the first step is admitting you have a problem. My name is Whitt, and I'm a recovering litigator. I've spent years sending ugly letters and playing a zero-sum game with strangers, and it generally didn't lead to a bunch of happy days at the office.
But ever since we started our Cannabis Industry team at Bradley, I have been looking forward to the day when I would be able to use those skills learned in my salad days to help my new clients in the cannabis world. Surely, I assumed, an industry growing as quickly and without regulation as the cannabis industry would eventually find itself in the crosshairs of the plaintiffs' bar in the same types of lawsuits faced by the operators of nearly every other type of business.
For years, that trend didn't seem to materialize in a large-scale way. As it had been from the onset of the state-legal cannabis days, the focus seemed to be on criminal concerns and law enforcement priorities. This was, after all, the heady days before, during, and after the Cole Memorandum and the question of whether the federal government would ever change its generally hands-off policy to state legal operations.
But still, no outpouring of civil litigation. We've opined on why that might be the case, but I think it's probably a mixture of (1) poorly drafted agreements that made the outcome of any litigation uncertain; (2) cannabis operators wanting no part of the court system given the legal status of cannabis; and (3) the fact that most cannabis operators didn't have the money to see a civil case to trial. With increasingly liberal cannabis policies at the state and federal levels, that is beginning to change.
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