With weed legal, cannabis lawyers a growing trend
A few years ago, Benjamin Pomerantz went to the partners at his law firm and suggested they launch a cannabis practice group. He was not completely sure they would go for it.
“Many firms, the partners said, to whoever it was, a young guy like me or whoever brought it to them, ‘No, we didn’t want to do it,’” he said.
There are a few problems with the idea of a cannabis-specific practice group. First, use of cannabis may be legal in Connecticut, but it’s not federally legal and laws in states where cannabis has been approved vary, sometimes significantly.
Also, while there are only a few laws dealing specifically with cannabis, the legal practice touches areas of criminal law, land use, regulatory issues, taxes, real estate and more.
But Pomerantz’s firm, Stamford-based Carmody, Torrance, Sandak & Hennessey, already had a strong legal land use law group and a group of lawyers with experience in alcohol and liquor regulation.
“So I sort of took those two things together and said, between these two things, why shouldn’t we be entering into this area?” he said. “We went in front of the entire partnership and everybody said, ‘You know what? Let’s give it a whirl.’ We were able to jump in and paddle out and we were ahead of the wave and we got a big one.”
Carmody, Torrance, Sandak & Hennessey is not the only law firm in Connecticut with attorneys focused on cannabis, but was one of the first in a growing legal trend. It began when cannabis was decriminalized in 2011.
A few years later, the federal farm bill legalized the growth and sale of hemp, which was followed in Connecticut by the legalization of cannabis for medical use and then, finally, recreational use. As the legalities have shifted, so has the necessary knowledge base for attorneys.
In 2018, after the federal farm bill passed, Pomerantz began getting calls from CBD stores, “Saying, ‘We’re legal, but we can’t find representation because nobody wants to represent us,’” he said.
When recreational cannabis use was legal in Massachusetts but not in Connecticut, Pomerantz had inquiries from potential employers asking how they might handle a situation in which a candidate tested positive for a substance that is illegal in one state but permitted in another.
“They were hiring someone from Massachusetts where adult use had been legal for years,” he said of one client. “They drug tested and gave him a positive. So then what do they do?”
Once recreational use of cannabis was passed in Connecticut and applications to the state for retail establishments began, Pomerantz found himself working with applicants, first on applications and then on lawsuits after they had been denied.
“The only thing you can do about a denial is appeal in court,” he said.
Now, Pomerantz’s cannabis group is comprised of a wide ranging group of attorneys who spend all or most of their time on marijuana-related issues, he said:
“I have tax attorneys that handle certain tax questions. I have business formation attorneys. I have administrative and regulatory attorneys because we have an alcohol and liquor practice. I have employment attorneys, I have real estate land use attorneys. I have intellectual property attorneys. I have consumer protection attorneys. I have contract transactional attorneys.”
As for the first problem, what Pomerantz called a “weird federal-state dichotomy,” he said that’s part of what keeps the practice of cannabis law relevant and interesting.
“As long as there’s a federalstate dichotomy, there will be specialists,” he said. “I think that once cannabis is legalized on a federal level, depending on how that looks, it could be more just part of someone’s practice. But now, because you have to be very keenly aware of what you can and cannot do, we are a little bit more of specialists.”
As Connecticut’s retail cannabis market begins to open and expand, attorneys like Pomerantz are finding themselves representing a wide array of clients.
Pomerantz said he represents one client who is a homegrown consultant, educating medical cannabis patients on how best to grow the plant. Another sells legal cannabis paraphernalia. Then there are the operators, farmers, manufacturers, delivery services and more, all of which either are already up and running or will be soon.
“And every one of them is going to ultimately need an attorney,” he said.