New technology tends to arrive before the law settles on how to treat it. Companies training models, issuing tokens, or moving money through software are making legal decisions every week, often without knowing it: what data they can use, whether an asset is a security, which license the business needs, and who is liable when the code fails. Our Emerging Technology service gives those companies a practical legal partner for the build. We focus on three areas: artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital currency and blockchain, and fintech. Casey Scott McKay, our founding partner, worked as a software engineer before practicing law, and the firm brings that habit of reading the system to every matter. We ask how the product works, then map the legal risk onto the architecture.
What The Service Spans
The work covers the legal questions that come with building and selling new technology, across intellectual property, regulation, contracts, and disputes. For AI, that includes rights in training data, ownership of models and outputs, customer and vendor terms, and compliance with laws such as the EU AI Act and Colorado's statute on high-risk AI systems. For digital assets, it includes token design under the Howey test, money transmission and FinCEN registration, the GENIUS Act's framework for payment stablecoins, and the enforceability of smart contracts. For fintech, it includes state lending and money transmitter licenses, bank partnership agreements, and consumer financial rules such as Regulation E, Regulation Z, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Most clients touch more than one of these at once.
AI, Blockchain, And Fintech Services
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning covers data licensing and scraping risk, protection of models and weights as trade secrets, copyright questions around outputs given the human authorship requirement, AI vendor and customer agreements, and governance programs that answer regulators and enterprise buyers. Digital Currency and Blockchain covers token offerings and securities analysis, exchange and custody issues, money transmission, smart contract terms, and enterprise blockchain deployments. Fintech covers the regulatory path for payments, lending, and banking products, bank and banking-as-a-service partnerships, payment flows and fraud allocation, and lending and credit compliance. Each service can stand on its own, but they often run together, for example when a payments company adds an AI underwriting model or a stablecoin settlement layer.
Disputes Over New Technology
Emerging technology produces new versions of old disputes. Copyright owners sue AI developers over training data, and courts have begun issuing fair use rulings that point in different directions. Departing engineers take model weights or prompt libraries, raising trade secret claims under the Defend Trade Secrets Act. Token buyers bring securities claims when a project falters, and smart contract exploits lead to fights over whether the code or the written terms govern. Fintech companies and their bank partners dispute compliance failures, fraud losses, and termination rights. These are IP, technology, and business disputes at their core, and they are where a technical background matters most: in discovery about how a system works, in preparing technical witnesses, and in explaining the technology to a judge or arbitrator.
Building Products That Hold Up
The advisory side starts with the product. We review data sources and licenses before training begins, set up documentation that supports a fair use or license position, and draft AI terms for customers that address output ownership, confidentiality of inputs, and liability allocation. For blockchain projects we analyze token design and distribution, prepare disclosures, and draft terms that sit alongside smart contracts and say which one controls in a conflict. For fintech launches we map the product to the licenses and partner arrangements it requires, negotiate program agreements with sponsor banks, and prepare the consumer disclosures. Deliverables are concrete: a written regulatory analysis, a compliance roadmap with owners and dates, and the contracts the product needs to launch.
Working Alongside Your Engineers
We start with a technical walkthrough. Your engineers or product leads show us the architecture, the data flows, and the user experience, and we ask the questions a regulator, an investor, or an opposing party would ask. Within an agreed period, usually a few weeks for an initial analysis, we deliver a written assessment that separates real risks from theoretical ones and ranks them by consequence and cost to fix. We then work through the fixes with your team, often during the product cycle rather than after it, reviewing designs, flows, and disclosures as they change. For ongoing clients we join product reviews before major releases, so legal issues are caught while they are still cheap to address and before they are built into code that customers depend on.
The Companies We Advise
Our clients include AI startups and companies adding machine learning to existing products, protocol developers and token projects, exchanges and wallet providers, payments and lending startups, banks and credit unions evaluating fintech partners, and investors conducting diligence on companies in all of these areas. Many are early stage and need a clear regulatory path before a financing. Others are established businesses entering a regulated activity for the first time, such as a software company adding embedded payments or a retailer launching a loyalty token. We also counsel enterprise buyers procuring AI and blockchain systems who want contract terms that match the actual risk. We work with clients nationwide from Washington, DC, and Knoxville, and many matters have an international dimension.
Pricing For Technology Matters
We offer flat fees for defined work: an AI acceptable use and governance policy, a customer-facing AI terms addendum, a token classification memo for a single asset, a fintech licensing map for a stated product and set of states, or a review of a sponsor bank program agreement. Each comes with a fixed price, a defined scope, and a turnaround date. Broader work, such as a full regulatory build-out for a new payments product, a multi-jurisdiction AI compliance program, or a dispute, is scoped and estimated in writing with the assumptions stated. The best time to call is before you train on a new data source, mint a token, sign a bank partner, or launch a product in a new state, while design changes are still inexpensive.
