Granite State News Collaborative

Cryptocurrencies are privately developed and maintained digital products for making and accepting financial payments and protecting wealth. They are intended to replace government currencies, such as the dollar-based currency provided by the U.S. Treasury. By far the most widely accepted and used cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, introduced in 2009. Millions of individuals and entities worldwide hold or have held investments in Bitcoin, and tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals and entities engage in Bitcoin “mining” (the process of creating new Bitcoin by solving computational puzzles).

What if your daughter wants to be a lawyer? In last week’s column, I wrote about the very substantial tuition and other costs of law school and of the crushing law school debts that many lawyers owe upon graduation from law school.

What if your child (I’ll assume it’s your daughter) is graduating from high school or college and tells you she wants to become a lawyer? What should you advise her?

Eric Grossman, the chief legal officer of Morgan Stanley, the billion-dollar global investment bank, recently sent a letter to all law firms working for his company, advising them that Morgan Stanley would no longer use the services of any of these firms if any of their lawyers worked remotely. His reasoning was, apparently, that these firms could not do effective mentoring of their younger lawyers or maintain adequate inter-lawyer collegiality.

In 1990, a national organization known as the Uniform Laws Commission published a new uniform statute entitled the “Uniform Electronic Transactions Act” (UETA), and New Hampshire enacted the UETA in 2001. In 2000, the federal government enacted a similar law entitled the “Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act” (the ESIGN Act).

President Biden’s first 100 days in office began, of course, on January 20. It is certain that before the end of January, he will introduce in Congress one or more bills aimed at dealing not only with the devastating health impact of the Covid pandemic on American middle- and low-income workers but also on the pandemic’s devastating economic impact on them.

Many readers of this column are New Hampshire business owners who, from time to time, use the services of New Hampshire lawyers, and a few readers are themselves New Hampshire lawyers. The following thoughts about the short-term and long-term impact of the coronavirus pandemic on New Hampshire lawyers may be of interest to these readers, but perhaps also to other readers as well.

In my column in this paper last week, I addressed the question whether, in order to protect New Hampshire residents from the coronavirus, Governor Sununu could lawfully require them to wear masks in public places and could impose fines or other legal penalties on them for failure to do so. On the basis of the relevant U.S. Supreme Court cases and a recent New Hampshire trial court case, I wrote that the answer is clearly yes.

Despite President Trump’s recent about-face from skepticism to support of mask-wearing as a means to lessen the risk of Coronavirus infection, there are undoubtedly tens of millions of Americans, including, perhaps many New Hampshire citizens, who believe that federal and state orders requiring them to change their behavior significantly to lessen Coronavirus risks are unconstitutional.

As I’ve written in previous columns, when the Post-Coronavirus Era begins—hopefully in early or mid-2021—many types of jobs will be in great demand because of federal laws and programs then in effect. Furthermore, long-term planning about these jobs may be important for many New Hampshire business people even now.

As a tragic result of the Coronavirus, tens of millions of Americans, including many New Hampshire citizens, will be unemployed when the Post-Coronavirus Era begins, and their only means of survival will be the trillions of dollars that the federal government will borrow to provide them with survival distributions.

On May 15, Gov. Chris Sununu announced his authorization for the expenditure of an initial $400 million in emergency relief under the federal CARES Act for New Hampshire small businesses hurt by the coronavirus pandemic. The program allocating these expenditures is called the Main Street Relief Fund. To obtain assistance in the program, businesses must submit a prequalification form by May 29 at the website of the Governor’s Office for Emergency Relief and Recovery (GOFERR).

Obviously, New Hampshire business owners must devote themselves primarily to managing their day-to-day operations. However, if they are wise, they will also devote a reasonable amount of time to planning for future operations. This should include not only short-term planning, covering perhaps just the next few months, but also long-term planning.

This is the second in a series of columns in Law in the Marketplace with practical tips on using federal and New Hampshire laws and orders to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many of us are working from home these days, and that’s opened up a whole new world of questions.