Organizations face complex challenges working to balance legal rules and undeveloped industry standards. With growth comes the need to meet various requirements while staying efficient and ethical. Effective regulatory strategies are essential for sustainable growth to protect assets, ensure transparency, and stay abreast of changing laws in a competitive market.

Jeremy Unruh is a founder and former senior legal, compliance, and public affairs officer of a start-up cannabis company that ultimately boasted 3,500 workers in eight state markets. Under a decade of Jeremy’s leadership, this company licensed, developed, owned, and operated nearly seventy retail locations and ten licensed cannabis manufacturing facilities, including both cultivation and processing functionalities, in the most highly-regulated state cannabis markets in the nation. These efforts included leading administrative and judicial litigation matters in multiple jurisdictions across the country, both personally and in a strategic management role.

Jeremy led industry efforts to reform the legal landscape of the regulated cannabis in nearly ten states and at the federal level. His leadership in cannabis law and business development includes serving as a government affairs executive, in-house and regulatory counsel, chief compliance officer, lecturer-at-law, and adjunct professor and creator of the first cannabis course at New York University. He also co-founded and served as an officer in industry trade associations in several states.

Jeremy's industry expertise has been recognized by publications like Crain’s Chicago Business (including their 2023 Notable Leaders in Cannabis), Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Post, and New York Times.

Beginning his career as a prosecuting attorney, Jeremy was trained in trial advocacy by the United States Department of Justice at the National College of District Attorneys. Before his appointment as the first-chair prosecutor in the courtroom of the Chief Judge of the Criminal Division of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, Jeremy successfully investigated and tried hundreds of drug cases, homicides, financial, and sexual assault crimes.

Jeremy went into private practice for a firm that would reach the American Lawyer Top 100 during his tenure. Joining the firm’s Chicago office in 2006, Jeremy helped grow the Chicago presence from a handful of lawyers into a powerhouse office of more than 100 lawyers when he left to help build the medical cannabis industry. His practice focused on commercial litigation, internal compliance investigations in the financial services and healthcare sectors, and product liability defense. He was the lead trial attorney on the national product liability trial team for a Fortune 100 industrial company for many years and tried civil cases in federal and state courthouses across the United States. His commercial litigation experience included representing creditors and debtors of various sizes in the 2008-2009 commercial real estate crisis, including lenders, financial institutions, and developers.

Jeremy has a Bachelor of Science from Kansas State University. He earned a Juris Doctor from Washburn University School of Law where he was an inaugural recipient of the Environmental Law certificate. While serving as an assistant state’s attorney in Chicago, Jeremy attended DePaul University Kellstadt School of Business Management at night and earned his Master of Business Administration. Jeremy lives in the northern suburbs of Chicagoland with his wife and three children.