The Most Important Thing to Understand About Cannabis Business Law

What you need to understand is that cannabis is a different area of law. This is not franchise law. This is not regular business law. I call it the cannabis-only transactions. That there are provisions in your cannabis contracts and your cannabis legal dealings that you won’t see in any other form of law. You won’t see it in regular business law. And you really need experts, like we have at McAllister Garfield, who can help you craft your contracts to make sure that they have those marijuana-only provisions.

For example, in Colorado, a normal lease from a landlord might allow you to take a percentage of profits of the tenant. But in cannabis, you can’t do that, because the regulator thinks that might make the landlord an owner. And so you need a lease that has very specific provisions to prevent the landlord from ending up being a licensed owner of a cannabis business. And that’s just one example of many areas where you have to have a cannabis regulatory specialist with a business background doing these transactions. Otherwise, you could find yourself in hot water.

So the attorneys at McAllister Garfield think about these problems every day. We know the regulators and we interact with them to make sure our agreements fit the regulatory regime. And we’re pioneers in that, in structuring deals to make sure we both satisfy the regulatory structure and also help our clients achieve their goals.