Articles Posted in Small Business

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200CE7BC-9B59-48E7-AB51-3F0959FB7762-300x200On June 1, 2026, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed an 83-page civil complaint against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in Highlands County Circuit Court. Florida became the first state in the United States to sue the maker of ChatGPT over the alleged safety failures of its product.

The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of knowingly releasing a dangerous product, suppressing internal safety warnings, marketing ChatGPT as safe for children without adequate safeguards, and collecting minors’ data without meaningful parental oversight. It seeks to hold Sam Altman personally liable for what it describes as his utter disregard for the risk to human life caused by his conduct as CEO.

OpenAI is a $300 billion company. It has some of the best lawyers in the country. It will defend this case aggressively and the outcome is genuinely uncertain.

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163EFA02-0F47-4A9F-819E-58A2CCC3A7F7-300x200Most businesses operating in the digital asset space think of compliance as a federal question.

Is the SEC involved? Does the CFTC have jurisdiction? What does FinCEN require?

Those are legitimate questions. But since August 18, 2025, there is a state-level compliance framework that applies to your business if you serve Illinois residents, regardless of where you are headquartered, regardless of whether any federal regulator has touched your business, and regardless of whether you think of yourself as an Illinois company.

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E4DADDE9-71EB-48EB-B75B-5DE2649B6BE9-300x200Most business owners think of their employee handbook as a formality.

A document you put together when you hired your first few employees, maybe pulled from a template, maybe had someone review it years ago. It lives in a folder on a shared drive or in a stack of onboarding paperwork. New hires sign it. Nobody reads it closely. It sits there doing what you assume is its job.

Here is the problem. That assumption is costing Illinois businesses significant money, and it is creating legal exposure that most owners do not discover until they are already in litigation.

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67888434-CAFB-435F-A004-C35C87F6A72F-300x200You opened your email this morning and something stopped you cold.

A letter. From an attorney. Addressed to your business.

The words “cease and desist” are somewhere near the top, followed by phrases like “immediate action required,” “legal liability,” and “failure to comply may result in litigation.”

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1D885828-AC8E-4C7D-8E85-13945F1AEBC2-300x200What is the current status of noncompetes?

The FTC’s sweeping 2024 rule that would have banned nearly all noncompete agreements nationwide never took effect. Federal courts blocked it, and the FTC formally abandoned its appeal. There is currently no federal ban on noncompetes.

What about Illinois?

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