Many cannabis applicants assume they need an attorney to secure their cannabis business license, but this is not the case. Unlike a court situation, where only attorneys understand the complex processes involved and the strategies to employ, obtaining a cannabis license is relatively simple–You submit digital documents, the OCM reviews them, and you have a chance to correct any deficiencies if your submission falls short. Attorneys have experience interpreting laws and regulations, but they usually don’t have hands-on cannabis industry experience. This means that when the OCM asks for an inventory control procedure or a security procedure, for example, that an attorney would know less about how to write such a document than someone who has been in the cannabis industry and has written those procedures in other cannabis-legal states. A cannabis attorney would simply parrot back the regulations, not knowing how the process really works on the ground level. 

That’s right. We sell a lot of written documentation to cannabis lawyers, including minnesota cannabis lawyers. Business attorneys are busy people, so they benefit from leaning on industry experts who can minimize their workloads. Similarly to a paralegal, cannabis attorneys farm out the bulk of their written documentation to someone who specializes in the subject matter. CS Consulting is well established in the cannabis industry as being a leading source of compliant license application documents, thus we frequently provide materials to cannabis attorneys all over the country.

If you were to use a Minnesota cannabis attorney, they would likely charge you $300-$500 per hour, with an open-ended tab that gets billed every 0.1 per hour. They take a retainer up front (usually $10,000), and bill against it until your balance runs low, then they get another several thousand dollars from you to re-up the balance. I have used several attorneys for various reasons in the past decade, and it’s been very rare for me to feel like they are attending to me well and being both thorough and economical. I’ve had them bring in other attorneys without asking me who get paid from my retainer money, make consequential decisions without consulting me, claim to have expertise they don’t actually have and lead me into bad outcomes. There are certainly exceptions, but attorneys are frequently distracted by bigger cases and by their high-dollar lifestyles. 

Here at CS Consulting, we charge a flat rate for our work, and you’ll know what you are getting before you buy it. We have drafted cannabis licensing documentation in a dozen other states and know how cannabis regulatory agencies work. We care if you are happy and we are easy to reach. 

In some states that issued cannabis licenses before Minnesota, such as Arkansas or Georgia or Illinois, licensing was competitive and there was no margin of error. This meant that your initial cannabis application submission had to be perfect and better than almost everyone else’s. Those were high-stakes situations, and it made more sense in those cases to use lawyers, but in MN, they give you what’s called a “cure period”. That means the OCM will send back your cannabis application for corrections, and we/you can fix anything that’s deficient. 

As part of the price you pay for our documentation, we will correct your application materials if the OCM sends you a deficiency letter. Not even the most sophisticated attorneys know how a regulatory agency will respond to a cannabis business application in Minnesota, and if they have to correct your application, they will charge you for the time it takes. We include corrections in the cost of our documents, so you will never pay more if the regulatory agency requests changes. 

If you use a Minnesota Cannabis Attorney for your Final Plans of Record (the second stage of licensing), expect to pay at least $20,000. Some will charge you twice that much. We charge half that much and will give you better customer service. In some states we have charged much less, but Minnesota has extensive requirements for the second stage of licensing. It’s a greater amount of information for a cannabis application than we’ve seen in any other state besides Georgia. A single endorsement requires detailed answers to anywhere from 80-95 questions, depending on the license type. 

That’s an important question! We certainly refer our customers to attorneys when the situation calls for it. This might be for drafting partnership contracts, management services contracts, operating agreements and employment contracts. You might also need an attorney to sort out legal conflicts with local zoning, land use, or a variety of other licensing issues related to local approvals. Attorneys sometimes get involved when the city is holding up an applicant’s public hearing approval. When there are unusual legal complications involved with a cannabis license application, attorneys are the best people for the job. 

We all hoped that the requirements for obtaining a microbusinesses license in MN would be reasonable, but unfortunately, they are fairly complex. This is due to the fact that cannabis attorneys (yes, that word again) are behind the scenes guiding the OCM on how to ensure full compliance with the law, and they’d rather be cautious and thorough than flexible and liberal when it comes to regulating a psychoactive substance. At least that’s the case for now. All of us in the cannabis industry are hoping and lobbying for simpler regulations across the country as we’ve seen licensed cannabis entities in so many other states struggle to survive against black market competition due to the stark difference in the cost of compliance and taxation. 

Our part of the documentation for the Final Plans of Record is $7,500 for a single endorsement, $1,500 for a 2nd endorsement and $1,000 for a 3rd endorsement. 

The other major expenses to be aware of are: 

• Facility Design – since this requires a fire suppression expert, architect, security company, engineers and possibly cultivation and manufacturing consultants, this part of your application could cost $30,000 – $50,000. 
• Securing a facility – This depends on the facility size and location, but if you are leasing a facility for cultivation, manufacturing and retail, you’ll need a deposit and up to a year in rent before you can become operational. This can cost over $100,000. 
• Building out the facility – Cultivation facilities are the most expensive, costing around $300 per square foot to build out. Manufacturing and retail can be cheaper, but it all depends on how fancy and high-tech you want to be. For a Microbusinesses in Minnesota, it will be hard to build out a facility that does production and retail for under $1,000,000. If your budget is fixed, build out a smaller section of the facility or get a smaller facility. Then expand once you have income. 

We suggest a $2 million budget as a comfortable starting poin considering that, particularly with cultivation, it takes several months to get your first harvest after all of that time and money spent building out the facility. If you are doing retail only, you can get by with as little as $250,000. Manufacturing can very widely depending on your extraction technology and product line. Making cookies can be easy and small-scale, but extracting biomass and creating a whole line of products with interesting branding can add up. The costs can be anywhere from $500,000 to $2 million. 

Official legal guidance must come from a licensed attorney in Minnesota. If you pay for an actual attorney to do your work, they must live up to a higher standard of accuracy. This is why they are very important in some critical legal situations. But with license acquisition, there is a margin for error that can save you thousands of dollars by working with a company like CS Consulting. The guidance we offer is more personalized, hands-on, customer-support based and affordable. We will cite and show you the regulations for any questions you have about licensing rules, entitlements and prohibitions for each license type, and what has worked with other clients. We offer free updates as regulations change over time, so all costs are fixed and established up-front. 

You have our guarantee- We will get the job done right for you for a fraction of the cost of an attorney, and we will start by giving you a free consultation. We can establish a rapport, learn about your vision of the project and create a scope of work that matches your needs.