The Go-To Guy

Posted on July 24, 2024

When New York legalized recreational use of marijuana, lawyer Jeffrey Hoffman ’92 (’98 JD) found his calling.

 by Paul Wachter

Up until March 31, 2021, Jeffrey Hoffman ’92 (’98 JD) had a varied career as a lawyer and entrepreneur, building websites for clients in the early days of internet browsers and advising tech and health-care startups. His latest venture, operating several dozen Nathan’s hot dog carts in Manhattan, had foundered thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.

Hoffman was consulting for some tech companies, but he wasn’t passionate about it. But then, on that March day, the New York Legislature legalized recreational use of marijuana for adults. “I was talking to my mom on the phone not long after legalization happened,” Hoffman said. “And I told her that the two constants in my life were her and cannabis.”

New York’s legalization of recreational marijuana predictably introduced a need for a wide array of legal services. Would-be growers and retailers needed licenses. Many former cannabis scofflaws could now have their criminal records expunged. Employees in New York, in all but a few cases, could no longer be tested for smoking pot.

Hoffman became involved in all legal matters involving marijuana — retail licensing, employment contracts, criminal-record expungement — and his eponymous small firm, Jeffrey Hoffman & Associates, quickly grew. “Jeff is the go-to guy in this state on anything related to legalization,” said Terrence Coffie, a criminal justice advocate and New York University lecturer, who served five years in prison for drug possession. Or as Hoffman, who also hosts a weekly cannabis Q&A show on LinkedIn, puts it, “If it touches cannabis in New York, we do it.”

Tech beckons

Hoffman’s father was a military doctor, and as a child, Hoffman spent time at bases in California and Georgia. When his father left the Army, the family settled in High Point to be close to his mother’s family in Greensboro. Hoffman, an only child, was studious. He studied algebra in fourth grade and continued to excel in math through elementary and middle school. He was accepted into the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics in Durham for his junior and senior years of high school. “I was good at math, but at Science and Math I met real geniuses,” Hoffman said.

Socially, the school was a good fit. “We like to say that the school took all the kids who couldn’t get dates in their hometowns and brought them to Durham so they could date each other,” Hoffman said.

It was there, as a senior, that he had his first experience with marijuana. “The guys who were already smokers invited me to come to the woods,” Hoffman recalled. “They said, ‘You won’t get high the first time, but next time you’ll thank us.’ ”

In fall 1998, Hoffman arrived at UNC as a freshman and made an impression. Richard Kaplan ’91, who was then a junior, recalled Hoffman drove a red convertible Ford Mustang with a vanity license plate that read “FABLES,” an homage to R.E.M.’s 1985 album Fables of the Reconstruction.

Hoffman pledged Tau Epsilon Phi, a historically Jewish fraternity, where Kaplan was a member. “I think the main reason he pledged is that we had great parking at our house on Rosemary Street,” Kaplan said. (Tau Epsilon folded its UNC chapter in 2010, and the fraternity house at 216 E. Rosemary is now occupied by Pi Kappa Phi.)

As a student, Hoffman said, he was smart but directionless. During the summer after his first year, he followed the Grateful Dead around the country, which he said was more interesting than academics. Near the end of his sophomore year, Hoffman’s adviser told him he had only three or four classes toward any major. He’d received high marks in a Russian language class, so he decided to major in Russian-East German studies.

After graduating in 1992, Hoffman spent a few months in Russia. “I got back to the United States and there was a recession, and they weren’t giving out jobs in Russian,” he said. He landed a job at Davis Library. The internet was becoming central to business operations at universities and in corporate America, and Hoffman was tasked with adapting the library’s systems to the web. Meanwhile, the self-described anti-establishment cannabis lover applied to law school. “None of us saw that coming,” Kaplan said. At the time, Hoffman laughed off his decision. “I told my mom that I just needed to get some letters after my name,” he said.

UNC Law School accepted Hoffman, and soon after he arrived, he worried that he had made a mistake. It was fall 1994, and the internet was taking off. The law school’s computer lab had just installed Mosaic, a web browser developed by Marc Andreessen that was the precursor to the more popular Netscape. Meanwhile, Microsoft was offering its new web browser for Windows 95. By 1995, Amazon.com, Craigslist and eBay would go live. The fast-growing tech space was where the country’s intellectual and entrepreneurial energy was focused — not in what Hoffman viewed as the staid and well-worn lecture halls devoted to torts and property law. Should he have gone into tech instead? Hoffman wondered.

After his first year, when most students were interning at law firms or judge’s offices, Hoffman took a job at the Public Broadcasting Service in Washington, D.C., to work on its early digital content. The following year, while still at law school, he founded the company Webslingerz with a high school friend and a PBS colleague. The business built websites for Fortune 1000 companies and large public-sector clients, including the N.C. Zoological Park in Asheboro. Webslingerz also launched goheels.com, which continues to be the University’s web hub for sports and receives nearly 1 million visits per month.

T-shirt, shorts, Birkenstocks

With his law degree, Hoffman started a tech-oriented firm called Lockhart + Hoffman with fellow UNC Law School graduate Ashe Lockhart ’97 (JD), whom Hoffman met during a class on cyberspace law. “We were kindred spirits,” Lockhart said. “We had a similar sense of humor and were both interested in pioneering web stuff.”

But as businessmen they were green. “We had no clue what we were doing, and we didn’t start the firm with any clients,” Lockhart said. “But a Charlotte Business Journal article put us on the map, and we started getting interest from local businesses looking to build out their web presence.”

The two young lawyers had different roles. Ashe was the grounded attorney, and Hoffman was the tech guy. The differences showed. “We were in the South, where most people wore Brooks Brothers suits and leather dress shoes to meetings,” Lockhart said. “Jeff would stroll in wearing a T-shirt, shorts and Birkenstocks. Folks would look at him and wonder if he was going to bring us coffee. But then he’d start talking, and it was clear he knew more than anyone in the meeting, and he’d get their attention.”

“I didn’t mean anyone disrespect,” Hoffman said. “I just don’t want to wear a suit and tie every day. I’ll wear one if I go to court. But you have to remember this was the early days of the internet, and it was expected that the tech guy would be wearing a hoodie. I had clients tell me that if I’d shown up in a suit and tie, they probably wouldn’t have hired me.”

Two years after founding Lockhart + Hoffman, the two partners sold it in 2002 to Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice, the state’s largest law firm, based in Winston-Salem, with 15 offices spanning from Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C. (In 2017, the firm merged with a major London firm and became Womble Bond Dickson.) Lockhart stayed on, but Hoffman had no interest in working for a large firm, choosing to focus on managing Webslingerz. To expand, he decided to move to New York. “I don’t cook, and I love to eat, and there’s nowhere else you can eat as well as New York,” Hoffman said.

The business thrived until the financial crisis of 2008. Webslingerz quickly lost its four biggest clients, including Nortel Networks Corp., a Canadian multinational telecommunications firm that declared bankruptcy the following year. “We limped along until 2011 and then shut down,” Hoffman said.

In 2013, Hoffman founded Simply Grid, which provided electric pedestals that linked New York food truck vendors to the city’s electricity grid, cutting down on the pollution created by the gas-powered generators food trucks traditionally use. That venture led Hoffman to directly operate a fleet of electrified food trucks, mostly Nathan’s hot dog carts. The business was going well — until COVID.

Hoffman pivoted yet again. Now, his career is tied to legal cannabis. Hoffman isn’t only pursuing a long-held passion, he’s also involved for the first time in an industry that may be recession-proof.

“Legal weed as reparations”

For most of U.S. history, the marijuana plant has been legal. It wasn’t until the 20th century that some states passed laws prohibiting marijuana possession, and the federal government followed suit with the 1956 Federal Narcotics Control Act and the 1970 Controlled Substances Act.

In recent years, state initiatives have turned the tide toward legalization, Hoffman said. “Even some conservative states, like Alabama and Mississippi, allow for medicinal use,” he said. And in 2022, Montana passed a law allowing for recreational use.

Today, adult recreational cannabis use is legal in 24 states, Washington, D.C., and two U.S. territories. Medicinal use of marijuana is legal in 36 states, Washington, D.C., and four of the five U.S. territories. North Carolina law allows neither use, though hemp-derived CBD products are legal, provided the concentration of THC — the psychoactive ingredient of marijuana that causes the high — of any product is less than 0.3 percent.

More than 400,000 Americans were employed in the legal marijuana job sector in 2023, according to a recent congressional report. That same year, legal sales of marijuana products produced more than $4 billion in tax revenue.

Passing cannabis legislation is only the first step in the legalization process. While New York legalized recreational cannabis in March 2021, it took another 20 months for the state’s new Office of Cannabis Management to issue the first 36 sales permits.

To be eligible for the first batch of permits, New York applicants needed to either have had a marijuana conviction or be closely related to someone who had, and also owned a successful business. The state’s thinking behind these early so-called Conditional Adult Use Retail Dispensary licenses was that people who had been hurt by marijuana prosecution should be first in line to profit from legalization — “legal weed as reparations,” as one magazine notably put it.

Harry Singh, a certified public accountant who had a possession offense, applied for a license. He spoke with more than a dozen attorneys to help him with his application. “It was clear that Jeff was the most competent,” Singh said. “He was straight to the point, and he also had personal entrepreneurial experience.”

Singh received his license for a retail business in Long Island in November 2022, and the next February his business partner received another license for a store in Queens. “We’ve used Jeff for all of it, and so far he’s two for two,” Singh said.

This winter, Hoffman was working with more than 100 other applicants. “Licenses are my main revenue driver,” he said. “And when a business opens, it continues to have legal needs, so you can have clients in perpetuity.”

But much of his time is spent on pro bono work. As part of New York’s legalization legislation, some marijuana charges were automatically expunged while others require a motion of application to the relevant court. Some New York courts have been slow to process expungement claims. “In the more conservative parts of the state, some judges have been dragging their feet,” said Julie Garcia, former Essex County district attorney, who now has a private law office. Hoffman helped Garcia win a case in Warren County, where a judge was denying a parolee medicinal cannabis for his chronic pain after back surgery.

In September 2022, Hoffman led the team that got Humberto Ramirez out of a New Jersey prison on early parole. In 2020, two weeks after the state’s voters approved recreational cannabis use, Ramirez was sentenced to seven years for possession of six pounds of marijuana. He remained incarcerated even after New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal directed prosecutors in April 2021 to waive mandatory minimum prison terms for nonviolent drug offenses. Thanks to the legal efforts of Hoffman and others, Ramirez was released. “If you’re a client who’s in jail, you don’t get a bill from me,” Hoffman said.

“I’ve never thought anyone should go to jail for cannabis,” Hoffman said. “The law enforcement that we’ve done as a country, particularly against minorities, has been really dumb.”

In May, President Joe Biden announced marijuana would be reclassified to the less restrictive Schedule 3 category— as opposed to cocaine and heroin, which are Schedule 1 — under the Controlled Substances Act. Cannabis remains federally illegal, but the reclassification makes it easier for cannabis companies that are legal under state statutes to operate under the federal tax code.

Meanwhile, state legalization initiatives continue. In Florida, nearly 1 million residents signed a proposal to legalize recreational cannabis, meeting the threshold for an initiative, called Amendment 3, which will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot.

Hoffman said he hopes to see North Carolina join other states in legalizing marijuana. A recent Meredith University poll found that 78 percent of respondents supported medical cannabis legalization. A medical cannabis bill passed the N.C. Senate in 2022 and 2023 but stalled in the N.C. House of Representatives.

Hoffman retains his law license in North Carolina and is prepared for legal work when and if the state passes legislation legalizing marijuana. He remains optimistic. “Twenty years ago,” Hoffman said, “if you told me what I’d be doing, I’d have replied, ‘What are you smoking, and give me some of it.’ ”

Paul Wachter has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, ESPN and The Atlantic. He lives in Chapel Hill.

 

Hoffman hosts a weekly cannabis Q&A show on LinkedIn. “If it touches cannabis in New York,” he said, “we do it.”

 

At the tech-oriented law firm they opened together, said Ashe Lockhart ’97 (JD), “Jeff would stroll in wearing a T-shirt, shorts and Birkenstocks. Folks would look at him and wonder if he was going to bring us coffee. But then he’d start talking, and it was clear he knew more than anyone in the meeting, and he’d get their attention.”

 

“I’ve never thought anyone should go to jail for cannabis,” Hoffman said. “The law enforcement that we’ve done as a country, particularly against minorities, has been really dumb.”

 

Much of Hoffman’s time is spent on pro bono work. As part of New York’s legalization legislation, some marijuana charges were automatically expunged while others require a motion of application to the relevant court. “If you’re a client who’s in jail, you don’t get a bill from me,” he said.

 

Cannabis remains federally illegal, but President Joe Biden announced in May it would be reclassified under the Controlled Substances Act, making it easier for cannabis companies that are legal under state statutes to operate under the federal tax code.

Hoffman hopes to see North Carolina join other states in legalizing marijuana. A recent Meredith University poll found that 78 percent of respondents supported medical cannabis legalization.

 

Hoffman as a Carolina undergraduate with his dog, Dexter. In those days, Hoffman said, he was smart but directionless. During the summer after his first year, he followed the Grateful Dead around the country, which he said he was more interesting than academics. After graduating in 1992, he spent a few months in Russia. A little later, the self-described anti-establishment cannabis lover applied to law school at UNC. “None of us saw that coming,” his friend Richard Kaplan ’91 said.

 

 

Marijuana laws by U.S. state as of April 19, 2024

<Fully legal

<Mixed legality (medicinal use and/or decriminalization)

<Fully illegal