Insights
This is where the firm's attorneys write about Connecticut and federal legal developments that matter to our clients — new statutes coming out of the General Assembly, recent decisions from the D. Conn. and the Second Circuit, and the practical questions that keep general counsel, HR directors, and family office principals up at night. Pieces are written by the attorneys handling the matters, not by a marketing team, and they are written for practitioners.
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Tax
The Connecticut Pass-Through Entity Tax Is Still Doing Its Job — But the Compliance Calculus Is Getting Harder
Seven years after enactment, Connecticut's Pass-Through Entity Tax remains the cleanest of the state-level workarounds to the federal SALT cap. But the interaction with recent IRS guidance, the 2023 Connecticut amendments converting the PET from mandatory to elective, and the pending sunset of TCJA provisions are all pressing on what was, briefly, a simple answer to a complicated problem.
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Real Estate
Commercial Lease Renewal Clauses After the 2023 Retail Shakeout — Where the Bargaining Room Actually Moved
By Whitney Chen
The retail vacancy picture in Connecticut shifted fast in 2023 and 2024, and the renewal-clause language that landlords and tenants had been negotiating against for years is now hitting its first real test. The short version: the bargaining room has moved, but not where most people think.
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Corporate
What We Are Seeing in Middle-Market PE Deal Flow — Connecticut Insurance and Advanced Manufacturing, 2024 into 2025
Middle-market private equity activity in Connecticut held up better than the headline numbers suggest in 2024, and the composition of the deal flow tells a more interesting story than the aggregate count. Two sectors — specialty insurance and advanced manufacturing — accounted for a disproportionate share of the closings we worked on, and the structures used on those deals have changed.
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Litigation
The Second Circuit's Abramson Opinion and the Future of Commonality in Consumer Class Actions in the D. Conn.
On December 17, 2024, the Second Circuit decided *Abramson v. Connecticut Light & Power Co.*, affirming the denial of class certification in a utility-billing consumer class action originally filed in the D. Conn. before Judge Dooley. The opinion is the most substantive Second Circuit treatment of Rule 23(a)(2) commonality since *In re Petrobras Securities* and it matters for any consumer class action with mixed individual-inquiry elements.
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Trusts & Estates
The 2026 Estate Tax Sunset Is Now Close Enough to Plan Around
Unless Congress acts, the federal estate and gift tax exemption is scheduled to drop from $13.61 million per individual (2024) to roughly $7 million on January 1, 2026. For Connecticut families in the exposed band — roughly $7M to $27M of taxable estate — the planning window that seemed theoretical a year ago is now operational. Here is what we are actually doing with clients in that band.
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Corporate
Three Operating Agreement Provisions the Revised CT LLC Act Quietly Changed
By Steven Stone
The Connecticut Uniform Limited Liability Company Act, Conn. Gen. Stat. § 34-243 et seq., has now been on the books long enough that operating agreements drafted under the predecessor statute are aging into disputes. Three provisions in particular have shifted in ways that most pre-2017 agreements do not account for.
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Litigation
The Pollution Exclusion, Revisited — Connecticut Superior Court Trends in CGL Coverage Disputes
By Claire Park
Connecticut Superior Court decisions over the last eighteen months suggest that the trial bench is reading the CGL pollution exclusion more narrowly than carrier counsel might expect — particularly in disputes involving indoor air-quality claims, PFAS releases, and the long tail of the Connecticut Transfer Act remediation docket.
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Labor & Employment
The FTC Non-Compete Rule, Connecticut Enforcement, and What Employers Should Actually Do Now
The FTC's final rule banning most non-compete agreements was scheduled to take effect September 4, 2024, but was enjoined nationwide by the Northern District of Texas on August 20, 2024. For Connecticut employers, the practical compliance question is shaped as much by state-law developments — particularly the 2023 amendments to Conn. Gen. Stat. § 31-50b — as by the federal rule's uncertain future.
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Corporate
SaaS Contracts After the Connecticut Data Privacy Act — The Provisions Your Vendor Template Is Missing
The Connecticut Data Privacy Act, Conn. Gen. Stat. § 42-515 et seq., took effect on July 1, 2023, and by now most Connecticut-facing SaaS providers have updated their privacy notices. The contract terms, by contrast, are lagging — and the gap between what the CTDPA requires and what most SaaS vendor agreements actually say is where the compliance risk lives.
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Tax
The BBA Partnership Audit Regime: Three Election Decisions Every Partnership Should Revisit
Most partnerships made their BBA audit-regime elections in 2018 or 2019 and have not revisited them since. For many, those decisions are now out of date — partnership composition has changed, the pass-through entity tax landscape has shifted, and the IRS's enforcement posture on partnership audits has become meaningfully more active.
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Real Estate
Waterfront Development in Connecticut After the 2023 CAM Amendments
The 2023 amendments to Connecticut's Coastal Area Management program, along with DEEP's updated tidelands review guidance, changed the permitting calculus for shoreline and riverine development in ways that do not show up in the public rulemaking summaries. The short version: two of the approval paths that experienced developers used to rely on are effectively closed.
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Trusts & Estates
Digital Assets in the Estate Plan — What Still Does Not Work, and What Has Started To
Four years after Connecticut adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, digital-asset estate planning has matured into a workable subfield. But the crypto-wallet succession question is still largely unsolved by traditional estate planning, and the practical tools available to fiduciaries continue to lag the assets themselves.
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Firm
The Hartford Pipeline: Why the Legal Community Here Is Still Not Reflecting the Community Around It
The Hartford legal community is smaller, more interconnected, and more stable than the bar associations in Boston or New York. Those qualities are among its best. They are also part of why the pipeline of attorneys entering Hartford practice does not yet reflect the city and region we work in — and why that gap has not closed as quickly as it has in larger markets.
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Litigation
The First Forty-Eight Hours After a Federal Subpoena Lands — A Checklist for In-House Counsel
When a federal grand jury subpoena, SEC document request, or agency demand letter arrives at a company's headquarters, the first forty-eight hours set the posture for everything that follows. The instincts that serve in-house counsel well on routine litigation do not translate cleanly, and the most common early mistakes are ones that cannot be fully unwound.
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Labor & Employment
The Connecticut Paid Family and Medical Leave Program Is Not a Payroll-Only Problem
The Connecticut Paid Family and Medical Leave program has been active for benefits since January 2022, and most Connecticut employers have the payroll-deduction side handled. The interaction between CTPL, FMLA, CFMLA, short-term disability, and employer PTO policies is where the actual compliance exposure has accumulated — and the CHRO and DOL are beginning to notice.