It's been a Whac-A-Mole year for in-house counsel, with the Biden administration's regulatory agencies unleashing a blizzard of new rules and enforcement actions and state legislatures and state attorneys general increasingly casting themselves as champions of consumer protection.

The environment has generated a deluge of work for outside counsel, who've been counseling clients on everything from how to write a compliant employee handbook to how to sell goods online without being accused of "dark patterns" marketing.

Much of that guidance is narrow and highly technical. But running through most of it is a common thread, best summed up by Amy Manning, chair of the antitrust practice group at McGuire, Woods, Battle & Boothe.