What are the risks involved with starting a marijuana business?

What does the ongoing federal ban on marijuana mean for California's recent legalization of recreational cannabis?

What kinds of insurance should cannabis-related ventures have?

Those are some of the questions professors at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law and marijuana experts will answer at a Feb. 2 workshop covering the basics of entering the burgeoning legal cannabis industry.

“This is going to be a $20 billion-a-year business just in California, as adult use launches. It's a massive economic event,” said McGeorge professor Francis Mootz III. “There is confusion, as things get settled. Lawyers are poring over this, figuring out how it works. [Marijuana] is going from state illegal to heavily state regulated, so it's this whole culture shift that has to take place.”

The McGeorge workshop is just the latest example of law schools wading into the hazy issue of legal pot. A growing number of schools now offer courses on marijuana law and the policy issues surrounding legalization. Vanderbilt University Law School professor Robert Mikos published the first-ever casebook on marijuana law in 2017.

And several law schools have already hosted conferences for attorneys who represent marijuana industry clients. The University of Denver Sturm College of Law co-sponsored a two-day conference in July with the Cannabis Law Institute. Seattle University School of Law has for the past five years held the Northwest Marijuana Law Conference, which examines trends in Washington and other states where cannabis is legal.

McGeorge's upcoming executive training session, which is being hosted by the school's Capital Center for Law & Policy, is unique in that it isn't strictly targeted at attorneys. Rather, it's designed to help a wide array of people get a handle on the opportunities and risks associated with pot, from those who would like to become involved in some way in the marijuana industry to the lawyers, real estate brokers, insurance agents and other professional services providers who want to assist clients in that space. The program is also geared toward state regulators who want the lay of the marijuana land, Mootz said.

“Folks who have already been in this business have obviously been sort of underground—they aren't generally hiring lawyers, accountants and insurance brokers,” he said. “But it's really a complex regulatory scheme. We think it will be beneficial for lawyers to get an understanding of the issues, but it is a broader outreach to folks who are business owners and even state regulators to understand how it works.”

The topic is particularly timely in California, where the sale of recreational marijuana became legal on Jan. 1. Just days later, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the U.S. Department of Justice would no longer follow the 2013 marijuana guidelines established by the Obama administration that advised U.S. attorneys to deprioritize the prosecution of marijuana crimes in states that have legalized cannabis. (Marijuana remains illegal under federal law.) The McGeorge workshop will address that development and what it could mean for pot businesses.

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions' Jan. 4 announcement that the Department of Justice will no longer follow Obama-era policies towards cannabis regulation has sent ripples through the industry,” said McGeorge professor Michael Vitiello, a marijuana law expert who will present at the workshop. “Experts in the field are unsure what the long-term effect is, but some predict increasing chances of Congress reversing that position.”