Griffen is a corporate and transactional attorney in Harris Bricken’s Los Angeles office where he advises clients across a wide variety of domestic and international industries, including technology, real estate, healthcare, wellness and lifestyle, entertainment, and cannabis, hemp CBD, psychedelics, and other new drug therapies.

Griffen advises businesses at all stages from startup to sale. He regularly provides guidance to companies and founders on entity formation and corporate governance issues, and drafts and negotiates a wide array of commercial transactions, such as intellectual property license agreements, real estate leases, company and asset purchase, and sale and other supply chain agreements, and loan and finance agreements. Griffen also assists clients with specific regulatory issues, from applying for competitive and non-competitive local and state government licenses through day-to-day regulatory compliance. He also assists clients with mergers and acquisitions.

Griffen began his career litigating high-stakes intellectual property and commercial litigation cases at one of the largest law firms in the United States, where he argued motions before state and federal courts and the California Court of Appeals. As a former litigator, he is intimately familiar with common contract negotiation and drafting issues that can lead to business and contract disputes. Though Griffen no longer actively litigates, he still guides a number of clients through pre-litigation dispute resolution and mediation and still settles a significant number of business and contract disputes.

As part of Harris Bricken’s corporate cannabis team, Griffen is a leading business and transactional attorney in California’s cannabis industry. He advises state-licensed cannabis businesses in every part of the supply chain and of a variety of sizes—from international and multi-state operators to sole proprietors. Griffen was one of the leading Vice Chairs in the first panel of the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s Cannabis Section, and he writes weekly for the Canna Law Blog and has written a variety of cannabis-related articles for a number of legal publications. He is also a frequent public speaker and panel host, and has been interviewed for cannabis legal analysis by Vice, The Atlantic, MarketWatch, Bloomberg Law, and Law360.

Prior to beginning his legal career, Griffen studied music at the University of California, Berkeley, and still plays electric guitar in his spare time. After Berkeley, Griffen attended law school at Loyola University of Chicago, where he was the Editor-in-Chief of the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, an oralist on the Giles Sutherland Rich patent moot court team, and graduated third in his class of 250 students. During law school, he also interned for city and county agencies, as well as for a federal magistrate judge in Chicago.

In his free time, Griffen enjoys spending time with his family and his dog, traveling, studying languages, cooking, and serving on the board of his local synagogue.