What the Corporate Transparency Act Means for Your Small Business

Image of faceless people in a corporate setting created using DALL-E 3 with prompts designed by the author.

If you're running a small business, new rules from FinCEN kicked in on January 1, 2024, and it's time to get your act together. Under the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), many companies will need to disclose their Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI). Sounds straightforward, right? But don’t underestimate this shift—it could impact everything from your internal data management to your relationships with stakeholders.

What Is the CTA, and Why Does It Matter?

In a nutshell, the CTA targets anonymous ownership structures often used to facilitate money laundering and other financial crimes. Small businesses falling under FinCEN’s definition of a “reporting company” must report the people who really pull the strings—those who own or control at least 25% of the business.

Who Needs to Comply?

Not every business has to file BOI reports. Exemptions apply, especially if your business is already subject to significant regulatory oversight (think banks and large operating companies). But if you're a typical small business with a straightforward ownership structure, you’ll likely be on the hook.

What Do You Need to Do?

Start by identifying your beneficial owners. These are the people who have a significant say in your company's operations or who own a substantial stake. Once you've got this information, you’ll need to file it through FinCEN’s secure system before January 1, 2025. Some details about how to do this are below.

Next Steps for Small Businesses

1. Identify: Determine if your company is classified as a “reporting company.”

2. Gather: Collect details about beneficial owners, including legal names, addresses, and identification.

3. Prepare: Familiarize yourself with the electronic filing system that opened on January 1, 2024.

4. Docket: To avoid penalties, mark the deadlines to ensure you file before January 1, 2025.

Penalties for Non-Compliance

If you miss the deadlines or submit false information, you could face up to $500 in daily fines, not to mention possible criminal charges. The takeaway? Get your information in order now.

For more details, visit FinCEN's site here. If you need additional help, check out these CTA Compliance providers. They are likely cheaper than a law firm.

• FinCEN Report

• FinCEN Advisors

• CTA Filer

• CSC Global

Thirsty for Authenticity

This post was originally published in January of 2019 on surefi.com. Photo Credit: Matt Durst

Chris Herron wrote a great piece in 2017 explaining how InBev is buying independent breweries to suck the life out of the craft beer community. It’s a fantastic read for anyone who is making a living in craft beer. He points out that “Brand Equity” is not something most small or independent business owners think about, yet it is their biggest asset. Brand equity is what gives successful brands the ability to charge a higher price, acquire favorable distribution and survive setbacks. Herron pointed out that acquiring independent brewers is a sinister (but clever) way for macro breweries to dilute the aggregated brand equity of craft and thus recover the very real damage to their core, mass-market brands.

There is one serious Achilles’ heel in the InBev strategy, as outlined in Chris’ blog. Consumers want something from each brand interaction. In this market, aside from quality, consumers want to be cool. Cool equals special, unique, and separate from the pack. When a person associates themselves with a brand, it communicates something about that person to their peers and themselves. Remember the Apple vs. PC ads? Apple was not saying their features made Apple products worth double the price of a PC. But they proved consumers will pay more for products that make them feel good about themselves.

If InBev is successful in compressing brand equity in the craft market, it will create a space “above” the soiled brands it ingests. That void is for something different that says, “I’m not a follower.” While only a small number of people will understand the difference, those are the all-important influencers or “mavens,” as Malcolm Gladwell called them when describing his “Law of the Few“; the concept that ideas spread through the disproportionately influential acts of a small number of people.

When a consumer buys a craft beer, part of what they are buying is something no macro brewery can make: authenticity. Authenticity is the rarest and, therefore, most valuable element in any consumer marketplace. Authenticity cannot be mass produced. Thus, massive breweries like InBev cannot make it. They can, however, destroy it by buying an authentic craft brand and folding it into the undifferentiated six-packs of mediocrity that fill the shelves of most liquor stores. Massive corporations can make any kind of beer they want, but they can’t “scale” or mass market the passion, sweat, and risk that independent brewers put into their products every day. Being part of that is cool. It’s fun and makes us, as consumers, feel proud of our local brewers and excited to try the variety that the craft industry has brought to our communities. When consumers buy craft beer they are buying authenticity.

The best weapon we have as an industry is our direct relationships with the “fervent few” who visit independent taprooms and spend a dollar more at retail to bring something “cool” (authentic) to the party. While the vast majority of even craft beer drinkers may not know or care that Wicked Weed is now a tool of a multinational conglomerate, the real beer geeks (not the snobs) started making it uncool before the ink was dry on the purchase agreement. InBev will smother the cool in each business it acquires, but it will happen slowly. Craft brewers can speed up the process by communicating authentically and directly with their fans.

Weed is the New Dotcom

Now that cannabis is a legit business, entrepreneurs and investors are eager to cash in on the green rush. But how big can it get, and who is making money from legal weed? From our perspective, the rapidly growing cannabis industry looks a lot like the dot-com boom. It’s not a perfect analogy, but some key aspects of the tech industry mirror cannabis so well that it's a helpful guide to understanding some of the challenges of the cannabis industry as we all try to forecast the future. These similarities include how companies in both sectors are financed, innovation as an advantage, rapid growth, technical bottlenecks, hubris, and exuberant expectations.

Finance: Both cannabis and tech companies are typically funded through equity rather than debt. Generally, no one lends money to develop software because, unlike real estate, there is no collateral if the business does not perform. Banks and other lenders generally won’t lend to cannabis businesses because financing a federally illegal business jeopardizes FDIC insurance, removes the process of federal bankruptcy, and is generally riskier. Therefore, cannabis entrepreneurs have to fund their businesses through equity, which means selling part of the company to raise cash. If the business succeeds, everyone makes money.  If it fails, the investment often goes to zero, and most investors walk away with only losses. This financial model is classic in the tech startup world. As a technology lawyer now working with cannabis startups, this investment paradigm is hauntingly familiar. 

Innovation: Innovation and potential disruption of legacy industries is a competitive advantage in tech and cannabis. Cannabis companies are developing new genetics, better processes for growing, and innovative products such as topicals, “fast-acting” edibles, and concentrates formulated for specific effects. Similarly, tech startups constantly innovate to create products and services that take advantage of technologies like the “internet of things.” The cannabis industry can potentially disrupt the pharmaceutical and alcohol industries. Over the past few decades, the technology sector has disrupted (or disintermediated) almost every industry it has touched, notably media, retail, and transportation. There is also an emerging “canna-tech” sector that combines the two industries. Novel e-commerce, gig-work services, media, grow-tech, and resource management software platforms are striving to be the Levi Strauss of the green rush. 

Growth: Both cannabis and tech have exploded, at least in terms of the number of companies and interest in investment. The legal cannabis industry has grown due to existing demand along with legalization in many states, while the tech sector has experienced extensive growth due to innovation and the rapid adoption of digital solutions, especially during the pandemic. In addition to e-commerce and web-conferencing, the pandemic also increased cannabis adoption. 

Hubris: In both industries, founders often believe their product is better than everything else. In tech, it manifests as “my app will revolutionize the [insert name of niche industry].”  In cannabis, you may hear things like, “we grow the best weed.” Really? On the one hand, the confidence that you have something new to contribute is part of what inspires people to start a business. On the other hand, while confidence can be a helpful trait, it's also important to recognize the limits of this mindset. Everyone thinks their product is better than others, but subjective quality rarely creates market dominance. Does Domino’s make the best pizza? Comprehensive research suggests otherwise. But it’s the most popular because they sell the best solution to the problem most people have, which is where to get a predictable, filling, and cheap meal for any number of people in less than 30 minutes.  

Dependence on experts: When Apple’s App Store opened, it exacerbated an already intense battle for technical talent to build a new generation of software and mobile applications. Smart and experienced entrepreneurs struggled to find experienced developers to write and maintain code in a rapidly evolving technology market. Many cannabis green rushers find themselves in a similar predicament. The plant is difficult to grow at any commercial scale. In most newly legal (or expanding to recreational) markets, there are not enough growers to manage all the new operations. Furthermore, many “experienced” growers got that experience under a different regulatory environment. Adapting to a new, state-regulated system with investors and employees is not a smooth transition. Hence new cannabis businesses are as beholden to their growers as tech firms were to software developers at the peak of the boom.

Expectations: These industries' final similarity (and perhaps the biggest pitfall) is that everyone thinks they’ll get rich in a few months. We all know the image of some pimple-faced teenager cashing in before zipping into the sunset after some big company buys them out. Sure, that happens occasionally, but the brutal truth is that 90% of startups fail. Of the remaining 10%, not all are home runs. But FOMO keeps the investment dollars and entrepreneurial juices flowing. People may think the cannabis industry is a surefire way to make money fast; it's “new” and in high demand, some even calling it a “license to print money.” Think again. The cannabis industry is not a place you can throw a few seeds in the ground and sell whatever grows for a quick profit. It has the combined complications of farming, manufacturing, retail, and some hybrid of pharma/alcohol, plus an extremely complicated and evolving taxation and regulatory environment. Everything is more difficult (aka “expensive”), including banking, taxes, leasing, and employment, to name a few. It takes creativity, business savvy, and much more time and money than most people seem to expect to be a successful cannabis company. Opening a cannabis business should be approached like any other start-up: with eyes wide open and reasonable expectations. Profitability for successful cannabis startups is often years after the initial investment.  Be wary of opportunities that promise, or investors that expect, a rapid return on investment.  As markets mature, the “wholesale price of cannabis flower” generally trends lower, while the capital costs for lights, irrigation, construction, and labor increase with inflation. In short, the formerly big margins have been harvested.

Differences: There are many differences between cannabis and tech, but some key ones include regulation and scalability. The tech business started out with little to no regulation. As small startups have grown into near monopolies and tech invaded every aspect of our lives, it is drawing more ire and attention from regulators. The cannabis business started heavily regulated, including, for example, laws like Section 280e that have unintended burdens on otherwise legal entrepreneurs. Scalability is another enormous difference. If you build a SaaS software application, the marginal cost of supplying it from 100,000 to 1,000,000 users is relatively small compared to that kind of growth in a cannabis operation. The raw material in cannabis is an agricultural product that must be grown, tested, processed, cured, and finished by manufacturing or packaging. Each state can restrict the number of licenses or plants that can be grown under a license, directly preventing scalability. Furthermore, the security and transportation of the product is a massive undertaking.  

While the legal cannabis business effectively began over ten years ago, this industry is still very new. It will undoubtedly evolve in surprising ways over the next few years. The future is impossible to predict, but studying the tech sector may provide some helpful insights while navigating the growth of cannabis. Tech operates in a funding cycle (sometimes characterized as a bubble) driven by investor sentiment, market conditions, and unforeseeable events like a global pandemic. The cannabis market is driven by some of the same (i.e., the pandemic) and also some different market forces, including oversupply, complex regulation, and a thriving black market. Some in the cannabis market see an opportunity for consolidation of distressed assets in the coming year. Tech may not offer a crystal ball for the future of the cannabis business, but I think it can illustrate some of the pitfalls and opportunities participants are likely to encounter along the way. 

Written with help from Lauren Leland

Stoner Candy Buzz Kill

Sweet Cannabis Trademark Infringement

Almost everyone in the cannabis space understands that they can’t get federal trademark protection for goods or services that violate federal law. However, that does not mean that naming a dispensary “Starbuds” or packaging goods to look like Skittles is fair game. 

Mars Inc. recently filed lawsuits against five marijuana manufacturers for selling edibles that look a lot like Skittles, Starburst, and Life Savers. As reported by the New York Times, the candy makers are not amused.  What is unclear is how the defendant(s) developed their “strategy” and if they thought about getting legal counsel to build and protect their brands.

Perhaps they assumed that since trademarks are not obtainable for THC products (or other things illegal under federal law) these were fair game. This is not true. Mars Inc. holds valid federal trademarks for these brands, which are valuable given the massive global sales volume behind those products. Additionally, Mars Inc. is a public company so the officers and directors have a fiduciary duty to protect their marks as assets of the company. 

Trademarks are a form of “IP” and the P stands for property. A property right means that the owner can keep someone else off their lawn, out of their building, or from using a confusingly similar name or logo. Cannabis entrepreneurs need to understand that intentionally making a cannabis product look, feel, and sound like another brand (especially a big one) is begging for a fight they can’t win and cannot afford to lose (a defendant infringing a federally registered trademark can be liable for statutory damages and attorneys fees).  As a general rule choosing a name or logo because it brings to mind another brand is generally a bad idea. 

In addition to the potential brand confusion, it is reckless and irresponsible to package a cannabis product in such a way that children can easily mistake it for the legal junk food that is too big a part of the American diet. As the cannabis industry continues to mature, manufacturers need to demonstrate that they are not wantonly flouting the law and putting kids in peril. If further acceptance and legalization efforts are to be successful it is foolish to give the opposition ammunition like the examples above. 

The smart way to brand a cannabis product is to choose something distinctive so consumers will associate the brand with your company and not as a rip-off of someone else’s success. Remember, a brand does not make a business more valuable.  It’s the other way around. As a business achieves some recognition (for quality, consistency, or other metrics) its brand becomes valuable because consumers associate the brand with those qualities. So start with a unique brand, that does not describe your product, and sets you apart from the other players in the industry. If the business becomes successful you will forever be grateful that you spent the time to do it well. 

ADA and the Internet

Hoping to observe COVID quarantine rules, you try to order pizza online for delivery. The buttons you click redirect across the entire website. You see a colorful list of toppings, but cannot add the ones you want like garlic and anchovies (they help with the social distancing).

When a similar situation was presented to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019, the Court determined that websites should be treated as places of public accommodation, like restaurants or hotels, under the Americans with Disabilities Act (the “ADA”) (Robles v. Domino's Pizza, LLC, 913 F.3d 898, 902 (9th Cir. 2019)).

So is your business’ website a place of public accommodation? The ADA requires websites to provide “full and equal enjoyment” to the goods and services offered if your website qualifies as a place of public accommodation. The most recent application by the Eleventh Circuit held that a website is a place of public accommodation only if it is so “heavily integrated” into the services offered, that an inability to use the website would prevent a user from accessing the business’ goods and services in any form (Gill v. Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc., No. 17-13467 (11th Cir. 2021)). So far, Gill is the highest standard a court has provided to determine whether a website needs to comply with the ADA.

During the COVID outbreak, the heightened need to access online information and resources may increase the likelihood that your website qualifies as a place of public accommodation. As businesses moved online for COVID, more sites have probably met the Gill standard and need to comply with the ADA. If your business came to rely on remote access and services in the last year, your customers probably did too. More people are living with disabilities than you might expect; a 2015 CDC study estimates over 50 million Americans live with a disability. Regardless of the legal implications, there may be customers that your business is failing to reach by not making your website accessible.

The risks of ADA non-compliance are substantial. ADA compliance is a matter of strict liability. Remedial measures after the fact and half-baked attempts at compliance will not reduce your business’ liability for failing to satisfy the ADA. For example, Brooklyn Brewery was sued by a blind woman because she could not use a screen reader to navigate their page and get information about a potential visit. Your business could be liable to non-customers so long as they had an “intent” to access the services (White v. Square, Inc., 7 Cal.5th 1019, 250 Cal. Rptr. 3d 770, 446 P.3d 276 (Cal. 2019)). In an interconnected world, potential customers may be in other states subjecting you to that jurisdiction’s rules (Abelardo Martinez v. Epic Games, Inc. et al, Inc., No. 19STCV41717 (Cal. Super. Ct., L.A. Cty. August 12, 2020)). Your business could be subject to California’s UNRUH act even if it’s located outside of California.

So what makes a website ADA compliant? The department of Justice has not set clear rules for when a site is and isn’t compliant. However, they have indicated that meeting all ‘Web Content Access Guidelines(WCAG) 2.1’ created by the World Wide Web Consortium would likely satisfy the ADA. Even if you use an “accessible” template through a website building platform, you should not rely on that template as complying with all of WCAG or the DOJ’s standards. At the very least, you should ask two questions; how do customers encounter the website? What tools and technology are they using? Customers may be using screen readers, text-to-speech programs, or other assistive technology. When considering how customers interact with your website, certain choices not only avoid ADA violations, but can improve all customers’ experiences with your website.

First, the organization of your website should follow a meaningful order; within a webpage, related materials should be easy to find including links to other pages. Navigation, including between pages, should be possible by mouse and keyboard independently.

Second, there should be alternative ways to access content on the website. The text should actually be embedded as text and not as a non-machine readable image. If text is included as an image and not formatted with an alt-text tag (like the difference between a screenshot of this page vs its Html with character codes), speech readers will not be able to recognize and reproduce the content. Pictures should include embedded “Alt-text” descriptions for screen readers and text-to-speech programs to reproduce the content. Audio-visual materials should be accompanied by captions and audio descriptions (platforms like YouTube can do this automatically). Older websites may not use these tools and should be reviewed and modernized to ensure all customers have access to the site’s content and features. If you have legacy video that needs captions, there are sites like www.rev.com that can do that for you.

Updating your website to be ADA compatible may seem like another resource-sucking task that you, as a small business owner, are bombarded with on a daily basis. This is why you should do it happily:

• First, it’s the right thing to do. Even if the ADA did not exist, if you really care about your customers and potential customers, it is completely reasonable to keep your site up to current standards for the millions of disabled Americans who might encounter your site. What message are you sending if you can’t be bothered to tag your photos and organize your content?

• Second, it has a direct benefit to you. If your site is using older platforms and cryptic organizations, it creates a bad user experience, even for those without a disability. People notice and remember that kind of thing as much as a rude staff person. Tagging your photos and images will give your website a substantial free SEO boost. For example, if you have a beer named Zuzax, any photo of it on your website should have the file name and alt text tag include “Zuzax” and perhaps the style name (i.e. Kolsch) which would give Google two more possible results for a Google search.

• Finally, it's the law! The cost of updating your website is a small fraction of what it would cost you to answer a complaint, even if you were to “win.”

You may be thinking “I’m a brewer, restaurant owner, or similar small business person. How do I know if my site meets these standards?” For details on website standards and the ADA, take a look at WCAG 2.1, or Accessible.org. Better yet, get whoever manages your digital presence to look over those resources and give you an audit of your site’s accessibility. Unless you just completed an update, your website would be better with some post-COVID care and feeding. Finally, If you get a demand letter or complaint, reach out to an attorney before trying to answer it yourself; what you say could be used against you.

How To Brand Your New Business

In this recored webinar with the NMSU Arrowhead Innovation Network we define brand and explore the dos and don'ts of establishing or enhancing a strong brand identity.

Wacky Names and Bad Domains

Crunchbase just released its annual report on startup names and it is telling us (thankfully) that startup names are getting less silly. The question is, why were they silly to begin with? And the answer is, domains. (Watch the video)

Back in 2015, Paul Graham wrote an amazing article that said, if you don’t own yourname.com you are telegraphing weakness. Back in 2015 [dot]com was the gold standard and anything else was seen as a second-tier domain name. Consequently, there was so much competition in the namespace that they had to make up names, names like Curiosis, Synopsys, and Vooza that are not real words (“fanciful” to trademark geeks like me).  These are fine but maybe a little hard to remember and challenging to spell. Fast forward to 2020 and a whole new generation has grown up with websites ending in .IO, .CO .NET and a bunch of other top-level domains (“TLDs”), which are now accepted by most consumers. Therefore, there now are thousands of new business names opening up that can be paired with a good domain.

Domain names are getting less silly. But a domain does not equal a trademark and does not equal a good brand. What some startups are doing is choosing very, very descriptive names, like thebrowser.company, which is a company that makes (you guessed it) internet browsers.  Names that simply state descriptively or generically what a company does or makes can be a massive problem because it doesn't differentiate one company from any others in the market. A great example from a few years ago is a recruitment site for college students and recent graduates called CampusJob.com.  The name was so descriptive, so generic for what they did, that users would tell their friends to check out CampusJob.com and they would hear CollegeJobs.com or some other variation of a site that had jobs for college students. Reporters even posted a link to the wrong site when covering them and their marketing would send people to the wrong site because users remembered and searched the name differently due to its lack of distinction. They had to completely change their name to WayUp.com, which worked out well in the long run but was a big and expensive distraction when it happened. The CEO wound up writing a great blog post about the mistake and what it took to fix it. Don’t fall into that trap. 

With more top-level domains, startups can get a cool name that is not difficult to spell or difficult to remember but don't make it generic. Ideally, it can be arbitrary. Think Apple or Amazon or Toms. These names are easy to remember but they're not descriptive. They become associated with their company based on what the company does and people's experience with the company. So do all that but, one more thing; remember that domains are not trademarks, so make sure that there's not somebody else doing the same thing with a confusingly similar name. So think about Toms, for example. There are Toms Shoes and there's Tom's (ok Toms of Maine) toothpaste. Do people get them confused? Probably not, because the products are unrelated. So they can both exist alongside. We have Delta Air Lines, Delta Dental, Delta Faucets. All registered trademarks but you don't walk into Lowe's and go, "Oh, cool, the airline's making faucets." So to recap, we've got more domains available, it's easier to find a name that matches, but pick the name wisely. A company’s brand may become its most valuable asset. Make it protectable from the beginning. 

Trademarks Required for Amazon Stores

Why does Amazon require a registered trademark to set up an Amazon store? The answer is trust. As the world's largest marketplace, Amazon depends on both buyers and sellers to participate in a way that creates trust so they keep coming back. They clearly have a great deal of trust from buyers, which is why Amazon has over 150 Million Prime subscribers. That massive audience is why businesses want to sell on Amazon. To keep those buyers coming back, Amazon needs to have great stuff for sale, and that means products from great brands that its customers recognize. What those brands worry about in a marketplace this powerful is losing control of their reputation and relationship with consumers. With over 150 million Prime customers ready to “Buy now with one-Click®️”, it can be easy for merchants to offer counterfeit goods, or knockoffs, and other products that buyers mistakenly believe come from those great brands. This kind of confusion can dilute, blur, or tarnish a brand by associating inferior products with the mark, and enabling freeriding where a well-known brand’s reputation is exploited to sell another merchant’s goods. 

To make successful and growing brands feel secure offering their products on the platform, Amazon created its Brand Registry, which “create[s] an accurate and trusted experience for [the brand’s] customers on Amazon” and gives brands tools to “to identify and remove potentially bad listings.” Rather than set up their own proprietary system for validating that a seller has a right to use and enforce its brand, Amazon relies on the robust legal infrastructure of the US Patent and Trademark Office. To enroll in Amazon’s Brand Registry “[b]rands must have a registered and active text (word mark) or image-based trademark (design mark). This trademark must also appear on your products or packaging.” They further clarify that the registered mark must a) include words (so you can’t just submit a graphics mark that does not identify the name of your product), b) match what appears on the product/store’s packaging, and c) appear on the “primary register,” which is the highest level of protection afforded by the USPTO and gives the holder exclusive rights to use a mark on the relevant goods and services. 

That may sound like a lot of MBA marketing speak and legal jargon, but it's really there to protect a brand’s investment and hard work to create a great reputation with its customers. If you are interested in selling on Amazon or other large platforms, the more successful you become, the more you will welcome those protections. 

If you need to register a trademark for an Amazon store or to protect your brand, Blackgarden Law has the expertise, experience, and industry knowledge to help you achieve success. Don’t hesitate to call if you have any questions or need a consultation. 

CARES Act Update

During this unprecedented and challenging time in our community, Blackgarden Law knows that there are many questions surrounding the CARES Act.  The two programs most small and medium-sized businesses will want to take advantage of include the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program (EIDL) and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). It is important to note that while businesses can take advantage of both programs, applying for both has implications.

The EIDL is a very low-interest loan and can include an emergency $10,000 grant. You can check out the details in this handy guide to the EIDL from the US Chamber of Commerce. The application process is fairly simple and can be done directly from the SBA website. Here is the direct link. 

The PPP is authorized for $350 billion in forgivable loans for the purpose of helping small businesses maintain their payrolls during the coronavirus pandemic. Unlike the EIDL, the loans will be made through an existing SBA lender or other approved institution. You can download an information sheet here and a sample application sheet here. Businesses have until June 30th to complete the application but we do not see any real advantage to waiting. Banks are supposed to be able to receive applications today (April 3rd), but it seems like most are scrambling to get up to speed on these programs and are understandably slammed with requests. You should note that the actual policy documentation and regulation around this program have not been released to the banks yet. Once it is available your banker should have more information.

In terms of interactions, you can apply for both the EIDL and the PPP, but you cannot use funds from both programs for the same purposes. For example, you could use the PPP loan for payroll and the EIDL loan for utilities, but you cannot use funds from both programs for rent (or payroll). Additionally, if you take advantage of the $10,000 grant from the EIDL, that amount will be subtracted from the forgiveness amount you receive via the PPP.

In addition, we know CARES has sick and FMLA requirements for businesses under 500.  You can read about the FMLA provisions here. 

We have spoken to many of you who are deciding between keeping employees on the payroll and applying for PPP to cover the costs, or laying people off who could actually make more money collecting unemployment. These are difficult decisions and we hope we can provide some help to you through these complex issues. Blackgarden Law wishes all of our clients and partners safety, health and prosperity.  Our firm is also navigating this new normal while we all work together for the common goal of rebuilding a strong economy. 

Selling Gift Cards During the Shutdown

Gift cards may help generate some cash when your business is closed. But there are smart ways to sell them that generate more revenue and fewer long-term liabilities. Listen as Leah Black with the New Mexico Brewers Guild talks about marketing strategies while we cover the legal and practical issues associated with gift card sales.