Professionals

Jay Purcell

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Jay Purcell works with growing businesses. After graduating from Berkeley Law in 2011, Jay began his career in Silicon Valley at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. At WSGR, he worked with small and growing tech companies as they negotiated investments, executive hiring/separation, equity incentives and exits. Jay also worked with the venture funds, angels, family offices and banks who made and monitored investments in these companies. In 2016, Jay transitioned to a practice focused on cannabis businesses, first in Santa Rosa and San Francisco, and beginning in 2018, in Los Angeles and Southern California. In the past six (6) years, he has worked with companies operating in throughout California, including Humboldt, Sonoma, Napa, San Francisco, Alameda, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernadino counties. These companies including the entire range of licensees: nursery, cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, testing, storefront retail and nonstorefront retail. Jay has worked on both sides of social equity companies in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles.

Jay has substantial experience negotiating LLC operating agreements, financing documents and M&A transactions, including on behalf or across from Twitter, Google, Gotham Green Ventures, Resonate Blends, the Emerald Cup, MSOs, legacy cannabis companies, MBCs, PBCs, and businesses not-yet-incorporated. This experience includes structuring transactions to achieve tax efficiency. On a day-to-day level, his goal is empowering clients to use legal agreements rather than lose time and money to creating them. Most basically, Jay’s job is helping little companies become big companies, beginning at the idea stage and running through exit. His work includes steering clients away from costly mistakes, especially concerning tax.

Jay’s practice also includes tech and health businesses outside of cannabis, including companies graduated from Y Combinator, TechStars, and Founders Fund, a vertical-takeoff-and-landing drone company, several marketing and AdTech businesses and sober living businesses.

Before law school, Jay was a graduate student in Africana Studies, where he learned Swahili, and an activist for health equity, especially concerning access to anti-retroviral medicines for HIV/AIDS. He was elected to the Berkeley Law Alumni Association’s Board of Directors three (3)-times, and as served as the Board’s Secretary for two (2)-terms. He has presented or written at Cannabis Business Executive, Berkeley Law School, Stanford Law School, ArcView, Los Angeles Cannabis Bar Association, San Francisco Bar Association, Cornell Club of Los Angeles, Future of Cannabis Project, Our Dream and CWCBExpo.