Meital Manzuri

Meital Manzuri has practiced cannabis law in Los Angeles since 2008; she launched her Manzuri Law boutique in 2010. She has watched the arc of the industry bend from the early days when criminal defense was paramount to the current tangle of regulatory and corporate concerns.

As a 2L at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco in 2005, she clerked in an unconventional law office populated by the likes of J. Tony Serra, a maverick civil rights lawyer famous for smoking weed at work and—when Manzuri was there—for defending medical marijuana pioneer Ed Rosenthal.

“When I first walked into that office, there were Grateful Dead posters on the walls, dogs running around and marijuana fumes in the air. I was in shock, but in a good way,” Manzuri said. “I never was the typical corporate lawyer wannabe.”

After law school, Manzuri worked for a year at the Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal, then moved to Los Angeles where her immigrant parents lived—her father came from Israel, her mother from Argentina. “As a little girl, I had a vision of myself as a lawyer in court. First-generation achievement syndrome drove me,” she said. “When I began my own practice, it evolved alongside the move toward legalization.”

Her client work now is about 5% criminal defense. The rest has Manzuri representing cannabis operators as general counsel in civil litigation, government relations and as an advisor on licensing, business strategy and risk mitigation.

“A number of my former cannabis criminal defense clients made the transition into the regulated market,” she said. “They traded the outlaw cowboy image for the business world.”

The cannabis business itself is hard, with heavy regulation and taxation plus strong competition. “We got the first license in Los Angeles in 2018 for a testing lab called CannaSafe, for example,” Manzuri said. “Now the market is saturated with labs—there are 48 in the state, and some are willing to fudge results. My client won’t go along with that approach, but now they are deciding whether to sell the business or close completely. That’s a business life cycle we see repeated these days.”

Manzuri said she relishes meeting the uncertainties of an emerging industry. “We have always had to make it up as we went along, from Tony Serra’s tax problems to the era of medical marijuana collectives to the current recreational scene. I enjoy the challenges. They put me to the test.”

– John Roemer