Alan N. Walter 
On July 4, 2026 the federal government launched Trump Accounts, a new tax-advantaged investment account for children created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. If you have a baby born between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2028, the Treasury will deposit $1,000 into your child’s account. If you have older children, they can … Read more
The United States is regulating artificial intelligence the hard way. Congress has enacted exactly one AI-specific statute, the TAKE IT DOWN Act on nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, and comprehensive federal legislation remains stalled. Into that vacuum the states have poured roughly 1,200 AI bills, with 38 states adopting more than 100 AI laws in 2025 alone. January 1, … Read more
When Apple took the stage at WWDC 2024 and unveiled Apple Intelligence, the company made a specific promise to every iPhone buyer watching. Siri, Apple said, was about to become genuinely useful, capable of reading emails, understanding a user’s calendar, acting across apps and answering questions that actually required knowing something about a person’s life. … Read more
Founders who receive restricted stock have 30 days to file an 83(b) election with the IRS. Miss the window and you owe income tax on the rising value of your shares every time a tranche vests, even if you have not seen a dollar of cash. Make the election and you lock in your tax … Read more
Costco sells roughly 157 million Kirkland Signature Seasoned Rotisserie Chickens a year, and it has held the price at $4.99 apiece for so long that the number itself has become part of the brand. That pricing discipline is now showing up in a federal court record. Two California shoppers sued Costco in the U.S. District … Read more
Between March 2024 and mid-2026, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia deployed more than $40 billion through a dealmaking structure that has no clean name in the legal lexicon. They did not acquire companies. They did not file Hart-Scott-Rodino notifications. They hired away founding teams, licensed intellectual property at extraordinary prices and left behind hollowed-out startups, stranded … Read more
This article was originally published on Law360 in June 2026. On April 17, federal prosecutors unsealed a 10-count indictment in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York charging the CEO and chief financial officer of iLearningEngines Inc., a corporate education and training company claiming to utilize artificial intelligence, with securities fraud, wire … Read more
There is a moment in every product launch when the gap between the promise and the reality becomes impossible to ignore. For the Trump Mobile T1 smartphone, that moment arrived from several directions at once. The phone was nine months late. It was no longer being marketed as made in America. The American flag printed … Read more
Two of the most consequential statements on artificial intelligence issued in the past year came from leaders who could not be more different in temperament, constituency or institutional authority. One governs the most powerful nation on earth. The other leads the world’s oldest continuously operating institution. Together, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas and President Trump’s Executive Order … Read more
The federal government may be the most formidable defendant in the American legal system, but it is not immune from a copyright lawsuit over a holiday social media post. Lee Mendelson Film Productions, the family-owned company that has controlled the Vince Guaraldi music catalog associated with the Peanuts television specials since 1963, filed four federal copyright infringement lawsuits … Read more
SUMMARY A federal jury in Oakland ended the Musk v. Altman trial on May 18 without reaching the merits, finding Elon Musk waited too long to sue OpenAI. The statute of limitations ruling cleared a major legal challenge for OpenAI as it approaches a potential IPO. For founders and investors in mission-driven ventures, the case … Read more
A prediction market is a marketplace where participants buy and sell contracts tied to the outcome of future events. The price of each contract reflects the market’s collective assessment of how likely that event is to occur. A contract trading at $0.65 implies a 65% probability. The model aggregates information from many participants, often beating … Read more