Anita Famili

Anita Famili, a veteran real estate practitioner, lateraled to Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP in 2013 and found a chance to expand her career into the nascent cannabis law field.

"Manatt had a small, quiet cannabis sub-practice with seven or eight lawyers dabbling in it," she said. "We had a client who was acquiring a 300- acre cultivation farm in Colorado." Whatever the purpose, it was a real estate deal. "From a dirt lawyer's perspective, dirt is dirt, whatever you use it for. Fundamentally, for me, it was just another deal."

Famili said she became fascinated to learn the extent to which all aspects of the cannabis industry depend on real estate. "It affects finance, cultivation, manufacturing and retail. For each area, there are underlying real property assets."

Today Famili leads Manatt's real estate transaction and finance practice and the firm's cannabis and CBD practice. As the real estate business soars and cannabis has grown into a legitimate industry, she's kept pace by serving on the executive committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association's cannabis section and on the University of Southern California's Real Estate and Business Law Forum's program and planning committees.

"I started out doing a deep dive into educating myself," Famili said. "Back in 2013, cannabis was still a very unsophisticated market in terms of deal structuring." A fundamental problem was the conflict between federal laws that make the use, sale or distribution of cannabis illegal and the move by states to do the reverse.

"It's unfortunate," Famili said. "It's almost like a fiction at this point where technical illegality at the federal level remains in place but there's a recognition by the DEA and the Department of Justice that cannabis operations under state schemes are practically immune from prosecution."

Despite the obstacles, Famili and her firm went forward and built a practice group. "We made an investment into an industry that we believed in despite the stigma. Now as it has developed into a legitimate industry, we're busy."

Last year she advised Ceres Acquisition Corp. in its business combination with Parallel Inc., one of the largest privately held, multistate cannabis operators in the U.S. One component included a $225 million investment by Ceres.

"At Manatt, we've grown the cannabis practice to about 50 practitioners," she said.

In Famili's non-cannabis real estate work, she represents PBF Energy Inc., a large independent petroleum refiner and supplier of fuels in its $1 billion acquisition of the Martinez refinery from Shell Oil Products US.

- John Roemer