George Bellas Bellas Wachowski

June 18, 2026

The Colorado AI Act Everyone Was Preparing For No Longer Exists. Here Is What Actually Takes Effect and Why Illinois Businesses Should Still Pay Attention

You may have seen the headlines earlier this year about the Colorado AI Act taking effect June 30, 2026. If you were preparing for that law, you were preparing for the wrong thing.

The original Colorado AI Act, formally known as SB 24-205, is dead in any practical sense. A federal court stayed enforcement in April 2026. The U.S. Department of Justice and Elon Musk’s xAI joined a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality. The Colorado legislature responded by passing a replacement bill. Governor Polis signed the replacement, SB 26-189, into law on May 14, 2026.

What that means is that the comprehensive compliance framework most businesses were tracking, the one with risk management programs, annual impact assessments, and sweeping algorithmic discrimination duties, has been replaced with something narrower. The June 30 deadline for the original law is effectively moot.

June 17, 2026

Illinois Just Became the First State to Tax Crypto Transactions. Here Is What Every Business Needs to Know.

by George Bellas

This happened yesterday.

On June 16, 2026, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed Illinois’ $56 billion state budget into law. Buried inside it was something the crypto industry never saw coming: the Digital Asset Tax Act. Illinois is now the first state in the country to impose a direct tax on cryptocurrency transactions, and the industry is furious.

If your business touches digital assets in any way, including accepting Bitcoin as payment, holding crypto in a company account, using a crypto payment processor, or operating any platform that exchanges or stores digital assets for customers, you need to understand what this law does and what it means for you starting January 1, 2027.

June 3, 2026

Your Employee Handbook Is a Lawsuit Waiting to Happen. Here Is Why

by George Bellas

Most 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.