Operators and regulators.
On the same desk.

A principal on every engagement.

You work directly with a principal or director. The person who scopes your engagement is the same person who drafts your deliverables, sits with your counsel, and picks up when a DCC inspector calls. There is no account-manager layer between you and the work. In most professional-services firms, senior partners sell the engagement and associates deliver it. We inverted that model deliberately, because cannabis regulatory work punishes the gap between the person who promised and the person who delivers.

That discipline has a cost. We staff fewer engagements simultaneously than a larger firm with the same headcount could. We turn away work when it would thin senior attention below the standard we set. The benefit is simple: when the regulator asks a hard question, the person on the call has the context to answer it in real time — not six hours later after a Slack thread with a partner.

Associates appear on engagements for specific specialty work. METRC tooling when the reconciliation requires a custom variance script. CEQA coordination when an MND cycle needs a dedicated track. Local-jurisdiction field staff for in-person planning meetings in counties where the specialist lives locally. Every associate assignment maps to a named deliverable in the engagement letter. None run the file.

Where the senior team comes from.

Elisabeth Austin spent eleven years inside the rulemaking body that became DCC, drafting sections of the CCR that California operators now build their compliance programs against. She leads the compliance and enforcement practices. David Austin is a serial technology entrepreneur. He founded the firm to bring product engineering and platform thinking to a regulatory practice that had historically run on spreadsheets and counsel relationships. He leads the strategic and platform sides of GreenState — the Education Suite, the Compliance Control Center, and the firm’s product roadmap — pairing Elisabeth’s regulatory depth with the systems that make it operate at scale.

The four senior directors come from specialties that rarely sit in the same firm. Our quality-systems director spent fourteen years architecting 21 CFR Part 111 and Part 210–211 programs in federal food and pharmaceutical manufacturing before translating that rigor into cannabis SOPs. Our local-jurisdiction director has carried CUPs or ministerial approvals through 31 of California’s 58 counties, and has served as a contract planner for three of them. Our METRC director engineered the variance-analysis tooling we run on every reconciliation engagement. Our CEQA director coordinates most provisional-to-annual conversions and has sat through more initial-study hearings than anyone else in the firm.

The hiring bar is deliberately narrow. Each senior hire brings ten or more years in a single specialty before joining. We don’t hire consultants who have done a little of everything. We hire practitioners who have done one thing for a long time — and we give them the authority to own that practice area inside the firm.

Meet everyone who runs your file.

The team page carries portraits of every senior practitioner, a named practice area, and a specific track record. Licenses shepherded. Counties carried. Enforcement actions defended. Rulemakings commented on. You can see, before we ever speak, who would run your engagement and what they’ve done before.

We publish that detail on purpose. Cannabis operators deserve to know which specific person will answer when the inspector calls on a Tuesday morning — and what that person did the last time a similar notice arrived. The team page is not a staff directory. It is the public record of the bench.