This American Bar Association program brings together experienced cannabis-industry practitioners — including Shay Aaron Gilmore — to share hard-won, practical lessons for attorneys entering or advising within the cannabis space. Rather than a doctrinal survey, the session is a candid, experience-driven discussion of what it actually takes to represent cannabis operators and investors competently in a market defined by the persistent conflict between state legalization and federal prohibition.
The panel addresses the foundational challenge that shapes every cannabis engagement: advising clients whose core business remains federally illegal under the Controlled Substances Act while fully licensed and regulated at the state level. Gilmore and his co-panelists discuss how this conflict ripples through every area of practice — banking and access to financial services, taxation under IRC § 280E, bankruptcy unavailability, intellectual-property protection, real-estate and leasing structures, and the ethical considerations attorneys must weigh when counseling clients engaged in federally prohibited activity.
Drawing on real engagements, the panelists offer practical guidance on entity formation and financing in a capital-constrained industry, structuring transactions to survive regulatory scrutiny, conducting due diligence on cannabis targets, and managing the licensing and local-permitting processes that gate every operator’s ability to do business. They discuss common pitfalls that trip up attorneys new to the space — from underestimating the complexity of dual state-and-local approval to mishandling the tax consequences of § 280E — and how to avoid them.
The session also covers professional-development realities: how to build a cannabis practice, how to set client expectations in a rapidly changing regulatory environment, and how to stay current as the law evolves at the federal, state, and local levels. For attorneys considering cannabis work or already fielding cannabis questions from existing clients, the program offers a grounded, practitioner-to-practitioner orientation to the field. Gilmore’s contributions reflect his exclusive focus on California cannabis and hemp law and his leadership roles in the American Bar Association Cannabis Law & Policy Committee and the International Cannabis Bar Association.