Co-written by Karen Balderama, Wendel Rosen LLP Business Practice Group Co-Chair and Mia Butera, Wendel Rosen LLP Business Attorney The COVID-19 pandemic will have lasting unknown effects on businesses and has already caused delays and cancellations with respect to fundraising efforts and investment transactions planned or already in progress. Although raising capital during a pandemic seems like an impossible task, there are investors and issuers that are carefully progressing through the process of pitching, conducting due diligence, negotiating terms, and even closing rounds of financing. I ..read more

The California hemp industry received welcome news this week when the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its much-anticipated interim final rule for hemp production, a critical step toward implementing the 2018 Federal Farm Bill and a key for states wanting to regulate their own hemp markets. The USDA Hemp interim final rule (interim rule) is 160 pages and, in contrast to its singular name, includes scores of hemp rules, including  clarifying states’ required practices for record keeping, methods for testing hemp to ensure that it is below the legal THC limit, and plans for the prope ..read more

Followers of Wendel Rosen’s California Cannabis Law Blog may be aware that our firm hosts another blog focusing on food and beverage law at FoodLaw.com. Today, Wendel Rosen attorney Bill Acevedo, who co-chairs the firm’s Food & Beverage Practice Group, posted a new blog explaining the truth behind the new so-called Farm Bill. Many in the cannabis industry were hoping to hang their hats on the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (aka, the Farm Bill) and its anticipated relaxation of the controls on the production and marketing of hemp as an implicit sign that it is acceptable to use cannabi ..read more

[Special thanks for this guest blog from Wendel Rosen attorney Wendy Manley.]   Those on the forefront of the burgeoning cannabis industry are a bold lot, striking out into the frontier of new, shifting and unanticipated regulations. While these pioneers may have know-how in cultivating, developing and marketing new cannabis products, they likely never imagined the tangle of regulations they would need to manage. Perhaps chief amongst those is the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, more commonly known as Proposition 65, or “Prop 65.” Prop 65 is the law behind that sign you’ve ..read more