California is a tough place to do business. Griffen makes it much easier. Businesses routinely look to Griffen to negotiate and close a variety of challenging corporate transactions. His goal is to find the simplest and most cost-effective solution to client problems in complex and often highly regulated transactions. His past experience as a high-stakes IP and commercial litigator allows him to easily diagnose potential cost and liability exposures while negotiating transactions.
Griffen is a broad-based corporate attorney. He negotiates and closes business, asset, and property purchases on behalf of both buyers and sellers. He represents borrowers, lenders, and investors in equity and debt finance transactions, and lessors and lessees in commercial leases. He serves as outside general counsel for corporate clients, assisting with entity formation, corporate governance, general commercial transactions, intellectual property licensing, and more.
Many of his clients operate in highly regulated industries, and include physicians, healthcare businesses, cannabis and hemp businesses, and emerging psychedelics businesses. Griffen has helped close to a hundred companies secure hard-fought licenses across the state of California. Griffen was one of the leading executive committee members of the first section of the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s Cannabis Section, writes weekly for the Canna Law Blog and Psychedelics Law Blog, writes regularly for outside publications, speaks on and leads panels, and has been interviewed for cannabis legal analysis by Vice, ReasonTV, The Atlantic, MarketWatch, Bloomberg Law, and Law360.
Before beginning his legal career, Griffen studied music at the University of California, Berkeley, and still plays electric guitar in his spare time. He studied law at Loyola University of Chicago, where he was the Editor-in-Chief of the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal and graduated third in his class of 250 students.
In his free time, Griffen enjoys spending time with his two daughters, his wife, and their dog, traveling, studying languages, and volunteering at his local synagogue.
