Foley & Lardner LLP

This week, the 17-state attorney general coalition and the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW) escalated their federal challenge to California’s Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act (Senate Bill 54) by filing a motion for preliminary injunction in the Eastern District of California. The motion asks the court to block enforcement of the entire Act while the constitutional challenge proceeds.

Internal Revenue Code Section 409(p) (Section 409(p)) imposes significant obligations on S corporation Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) with severe penalties for noncompliance. A violation of Section 409(p) can result in a 50% excise tax, deemed distributions to participants, potential loss of tax qualified ESOP plan status, and termination of the company’s S corporation election.

For multinational companies, sell-side contracts — customer, distributor, reseller, licensing, and service agreements — often define the company’s front-line regulatory exposure. These agreements govern how products are sold, priced, shipped, supported, and represented in the market, and they frequently determine who bears responsibility for regulatory compliance, trade costs, and downstream conduct.

Analysis by Julie Dautermann, Competitive Intelligence Analyst Foley is here to help you through all aspects of rethinking your long-term business strategies, investments, partnerships, and technology. Contact the authors, your Foley relationship partner, or our Automotive Team to discuss and learn more.

Most compliance problems announce themselves. This one does not. Your plan has been operating under the CARES Act, SECURE 1.0, and SECURE 2.0 for years, your participants have received communications describing those features, and your recordkeeper has administered them faithfully. The only thing that could be missing is the plan language.

July 13, 2026 Energized with Foley Reading the Energy Markets: A Commodity Trader's View from the Floor In this episode of Energized with Foley, Deanna Reitman talks with Steven Hollerbach, principal of Alcazar Energy Trading LLC, about the high-stakes world of commodity trading and the vital role traders play in keeping energy markets in balance.

August 17, 2026 The Path & The Practice Episode 140: Donavon Lea This episode features a conversation with Donavon Lea. Donavon is 2L summer associate in Foley’s Los Angeles office focused on health care. In this discussion, Donovan reflects on growing up in Virginia Beach, VA, and earning his BA and MPH from the University of Virginia before attending UCLA for law school.

In June, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a fresh round of new and amended Venezuela-related general licenses (GLs) targeting sectors such as energy, financial services, and aviation. Taken together, these actions signal OFAC’s continued recalibration of the Venezuela sanctions program — tightening restrictions in some areas while carving out narrow pathways for certain commercial and humanitarian activities.

The board meeting is running long. The CEO has just finished the growth story, and everyone in the room is nodding along. Then someone asks the CFO the only question that matters: “Does the cash support this?” The room goes quiet in a specific way. Everyone else in that meeting is allowed to be optimistic. The CFO is not.

In an era of heightened discretionary denial of inter partes review (IPR) petitions, petitioners have latched onto the second prong of the Advanced Bionics[1] framework to navigate the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) evolving discretionary denial threshold.[2] Decided five years before the surge of discretionary denial decisions in 2025, the second prong of Advanced Bionics requires the Director to determine “whether the petitioner has demonstrated that the Office erred in a...