New York's recreational cannabis industry has the potential to be a multibillion-dollar industry. Yet, in the first year of legality, New York cannabis is struggling to generate the expected tax revenues for the state government, with a meager $70 million in legal sales as of August. Continue Reading
Employee Relations Law Journal | ESG Investing by ERISA Plan Fiduciaries: The Saga Continues
There has been a long, confusing trail of regulatory and sub-regulatory guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) dealing with the standards that plan fiduciaries must meet when selecting socially-conscientious investments for their retirement plan (i.e., so-called ESG investments). Continue Reading
Westlaw Today | Valuation and Regulation Risks and Opportunities in Commercial Real Estate
A significant number of mortgages are maturing in the near-term, requiring refinancing at a time of relatively higher interest rates and lower occupancy. These are factors that tend to reduce valuations. Reduced valuations, in turn, increase the risk of losses and litigation. Continue Reading
Sports Business Journal | A New Semester of Challenges: College Athletics’ Gambling Dilemma
In the ever-evolving realm of collegiate athletics, 2023 stands as a testament to the unexpected. Last month, more than a dozen current and former student athletes from the University of Iowa and Iowa State University were criminally charged in connection with betting activity. The players allegedly Continue Reading
SUBTA | Subscription Law Insights: FTC Accuses Amazon of Tricking Customers
The FTC’s action against Amazon marks the latest in the agency’s wave of activity directed at “dark patterns,” including its Staff Report on Dark Patterns and proposed revisions to the Negative Option Rule. According to the FTC, “dark patterns” are “manipulative design elements Continue Reading
Westlaw Today | Embracing AI’s Disruption of the Music Industry: Advantages, Challenges and the Future
If alarm bells were already ringing in the music business, they grew deafening when the AI-generated track “Heart on My Sleeve” made headlines in April of 2023. The now-infamous song harnessed AI voice-cloning technology to create a startlingly lifelike — but ultimately “deepfake” — collaborative Continue Reading
Commercial Observer | How Valuation and Materiality Become Catalysts for CRE Litigation
AdExchanger | New US Privacy Rules For Sensitive Data: Key Items To Consider For The Rest Of 2023
U.S. state privacy laws are multiplying at a dizzying rate. The Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act, which came into effect on January 1, 2023, will be followed by the Colorado Privacy Act and the Connecticut Data Privacy Act on July 1, 2023 (“VA/CO/CT Laws”), the same date that the new Continue Reading
The Licensing Journal | Is an NIL Crackdown on the Horizon? NCAA Signals Changes in Enforcement
After a series of losses culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in NCAA v. Alston, the NCAA seemingly stepped back from aggressive public enforcement of impermissible benefits to student-athletes' rules violations. Following Alston, the NCAA issued an interim NIL policy in June 2021 that Continue Reading
Employee Relations Law Journal | Milestone Retirement Reform Arrives: Key Provisions of SECURE 2.0
On December 29, 2022, President Biden signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023, which contains an impressive collection of retirement plan reform provisions, popularly known as "SECURE 2.0." While certain elements of SECURE 2.0 build on provisions of other recent retirement reform, Continue Reading