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Straight Talk About the Law
Actionable legal tips, real-world examples, and strategic advice—written for people, not just lawyers.
All articles are for general-information purposes only and are not legal advice.
Legal Insights & Updates
July 2, 2025
Why Everyone Needs a Simple Estate Plan
Death isn’t fun to think about, but it happens to all of us. If you don’t plan ahead, your stuff—like your money, house, or even your...
June 25, 2025
Understanding Succession Planning vs. Estate Planning
Have you ever wondered what happens to your stuff or your business when you’re not around anymore? That’s where succession planning and...
June 18, 2025
Understanding Probate vs. Estate Planning: What's the Difference?
When someone passes away, their belongings—like their house, car, or money—need to be handled somehow. Two terms you might hear are...
June 3, 2025
What Is the Most Important Decision in Estate Planning?
Estate planning is about deciding what happens to your stuff after you’re gone. Stuff like your money, house, or favorite things. In...
June 3, 2025
How to Find the Right Estate Planning Attorney
Estate planning is a critical step in securing your legacy and ensuring your wishes are honored. Whether you’re drafting a will, setting...
June 3, 2025
Steps for Creating Your Estate Plan
Estate planning might sound like something reserved for the ultra-wealthy or the twilight years of life, but the truth is, it’s a smart...
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All Posts
What Happens When 50/50 LLC Owners Cannot Agree?
In Montana Food, LLC v. Todosijevic, two people each owned 50% of a Wyoming LLC. Over time, however, one of them formed the belief that he had contributed substantially more capital than the other. He eventually tried to adjust the ownership percentages to reflect that belief—giving himself approximately 99.7% and reducing the other member to less than 1%. The Wyoming Supreme Court held that he could not do that unilaterally. The parties remained 50/50 owners. The court also
Dustin Slade
Oct 136 min read
Does a Wyoming DUNA Need an Operating Agreement?
A Wyoming DUNA does not need an “operating agreement” in the same sense as a conventional LLC. Wyoming uses a broader concept: the DUNA's governing principles. Those governing principles can include a written association agreement, but they can also include smart contracts, consensus mechanisms, enacted governance proposals, and established practices. In other words, Wyoming does not require a DAO to copy its entire governance system into a traditional legal document before t
Dustin Slade
Oct 67 min read
Should You Name a Trust or Your Children as Beneficiaries of Your IRA?
Suppose your estate plan leaves everything equally to your three children. You also have a revocable trust and a substantial IRA. It can seem natural to make the IRA payable to the trust. After all, the trust contains the estate plan. But that is not always the better arrangement. For many families, naming responsible adult children directly as IRA beneficiaries preserves greater tax and financial flexibility and avoids another layer of administration. A trust can still be th
Dustin Slade
Oct 35 min read
Does Being a DAO Multisig Signer Create Personal Liability?
A DAO asks you to become one of seven signers on its treasury multisig. Four signatures are required to move funds. You cannot take anything by yourself, and your instructions are simple: check that a transaction matches an approved governance proposal, then sign it. Have you just volunteered to become personally responsible for everything the DAO does? Not necessarily. But the key itself does not answer the question. “Multisig signer” is a technical role, not a uniform legal
Dustin Slade
Oct 27 min read
Can a Wyoming DUNA Stop a Governance Attack by Your Own Token Holders?
On Sunday, July 28, 2024, Compound's governance contract did exactly what it was built to do. Proposal 289, which would have moved 499,000 COMP, then worth roughly $24 million, out of the protocol's reserves and into a yield product run by a voting bloc that called itself the Golden Boys, passed by 682,191 votes to 633,636. Eighty-two percent of the winning votes arrived in the final thirty-four minutes. Nothing was hacked. No signature was forged. Every rule in the code was
Dustin Slade
Sep 308 min read
Estate Planning for Cryptocurrency and Digital Assets: Who Gets the Bitcoin—and Can They Access It?
Suppose someone dies owning $500,000 of Bitcoin. His will is perfectly clear: everything goes equally to his three children. There is no family dispute. Nobody questions the will. The children plainly inherit the estate. There is only one problem. Nobody knows how to access the Bitcoin. That scenario illustrates what makes cryptocurrency different from many other estate-planning assets. With Bitcoin, two questions that usually travel together can come apart: Who is legally en
Dustin Slade
Sep 257 min read
Who Can Sign Contracts for a Wyoming DUNA?
A DAO votes to hire a software-security firm. The proposal passes on-chain. The scope and budget are approved. The vendor sends over its services agreement. Then comes an unexpectedly ordinary question: Who signs it? A Wyoming DUNA can enter contracts in its own name. But being a token holder, voter, or member does not automatically give someone authority to bind it. Wyoming expressly says a member is not an agent of the DUNA solely because that person is a member. The practi
Dustin Slade
Sep 236 min read
Can Your DAO Be Sued, and Who Gets Served?
In September 2022, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Ooki DAO in federal court in San Francisco. Ooki had no physical address, and the CFTC said it had taken extensive steps but could not identify anyone authorized to accept service on the DAO's behalf, so the agency asked the court to let it serve the DAO through the "Help Chat Box" on Ooki's website and a thread on its governance forum. On December 20, 2022, the court held that service through those channels sat
Dustin Slade
Sep 2111 min read
Why Would a Startup Put Its Equity On-Chain From Day One?
Imagine two people starting an ordinary software company. No cryptocurrency. No DeFi protocol. No plans to sell a speculative token. They expect to hire twenty people, give some of them equity, raise outside capital, and perhaps eventually have owners in several countries. Should they put the company's equity on a blockchain from day one? A few years ago, the sensible answer for almost any ordinary startup would have been an emphatic "no." Today the answer is more interesting
Dustin Slade
Sep 157 min read
Can a DAO Outlive Its Developer? What Syndicate and Balancer Show
In May 2026, Syndicate Labs announced it was winding down after five years; the rollup market it built for had shrunk, and the company said it could not wait out the environment. The SYND token fell to a then-all-time low the same week. But the announcement carried a second point that most of the coverage treated as a footnote: Syndicate was two entities, not one. The development company was closing. The Syndicate Network Collective, a separate Wyoming decentralized unincorpo
Dustin Slade
Sep 115 min read
Completed Gift vs. Incomplete Gift Trusts: Tax & Basis Planning
Estate planning contains a few phrases that sound more intuitive than they are. “Completed gift” is one of them. Suppose you transfer $3 million of investments into an irrevocable trust for your children. Have you made a gift? Are the investments still part of your estate? Who pays the income tax? Will the investments receive a new tax basis when you die? Surprisingly, the answers to those questions do not necessarily move together. A trust can involve a completed gift while
Dustin Slade
Sep 48 min read
Can a Non-U.S. DAO Form a Wyoming DUNA?
A DAO does not need U.S. founders, U.S. token holders, or a Wyoming office to use Wyoming’s DUNA statute. The Act’s eligibility test asks different questions: does the association have at least 100 members joined by mutual consent for a common nonprofit purpose, has it elected into the DUNA Act, and is it not already organized under another law? Nothing in that test requires U.S. citizenship or residency. That makes the DUNA unusually accessible to a globally distributed DAO.
Dustin Slade
Sep 36 min read
I Moved to Wyoming. Do I Need a New Will or Trust?
Moving to Wyoming requires a long checklist: change your driver’s license, register your vehicles, find a new doctor, update your insurance. Somewhere farther down that list should be your estate plan. The good news is that moving across state lines does not ordinarily turn a valid will or trust into scrap paper. Wyoming law is fairly accommodating to estate-planning documents created elsewhere. But “still valid” and “still a good estate plan” are two different things. A docu
Dustin Slade
Aug 286 min read
What the DUNA Liability Shield Covers (and Where It Stops)
In September 2025, Uniswap Governance became the largest DAO to adopt Wyoming's DUNA statute, converting into an entity its own foundation called "DUNI" after a token-holder vote carried by roughly 52.9 million votes. Thousands of people who had never filed so much as a DBA now hold a formal, if unfamiliar, kind of membership. The pitch behind that vote (behind most DUNA conversions) is that the wrapper solves the liability problem. And it does, mostly. But "mostly" is not go
Dustin Slade
Aug 268 min read
Two Wyoming Wrappers, One Federal Question
Somewhere in your DAO's smart contract is probably a function that pays out protocol fees, pro rata, to a few thousand wallets holding your governance token. Nobody drafted a partnership agreement. Nobody filed an election. Most of the wallet holders have never spoken to one another, let alone agreed to go into business together. Under federal tax law, none of that may matter. This piece covers four things: how the tax code can find a partnership without anyone intending to f
Dustin Slade
Aug 258 min read
Treasury Control for a Wyoming DUNA: Key Considerations
In June 2026, the ENS DAO's governance forum took up a proposal that would hand its Foundation Board administrative control over the DAO's operational wallet, its ENS token holdings, and a roughly $65 million Endowment Safe. One Security Council member called it, plainly, "the equivalent of treasury capture by ENS Labs." Nobody disputed that the Foundation needed some authority to function. The fight was over how much, checked by whom, and for how long, which is exactly the q
Dustin Slade
Aug 214 min read
Hiring Your First Employee in Albuquerque: What New Mexico Law Actually Requires
Your business has grown to the point where you need help. That is a milestone worth celebrating — and the moment your legal obligations change significantly. Most "first employee" checklists you'll find online are written for a national audience. They cover the federal basics and stop. New Mexico layers several requirements on top of federal law that apply from your very first hire, and Albuquerque adds its own wage rules that just changed. This guide walks through the obliga
Dustin Slade
Jul 914 min read
Wyoming DAO LLC vs. Marshall Islands DAO LLC: Which Legal Wrapper Fits an International DAO?
Two jurisdictions claim to be first. Wyoming says it was the first government anywhere to give a DAO a legal home, in 2021. The Marshall Islands says it was the first sovereign nation to do the same, a year later. Neither claim is wrong, and neither answers the question a DAO with contributors on five continents actually has to answer: which one, if either, should hold the treasury? This piece compares the two leading "DAO LLC" statutes — Wyoming's and the Marshall Islands' —
Dustin Slade
Jul 83 min read
Yes, You Can Leave an Inheritance for Your Pet — Here's How It Actually Works
If you've ever joked that your dog is the only family member who deserves your money, Wyoming law is prepared to take you seriously. But there's a right way and a wrong way to do it, and the wrong way is more common than you'd think. Let's walk through the mechanics. The Problem: Your Pet Is Property Start with the uncomfortable legal reality. In the eyes of the law, your dog, cat, or horse is personal property — legally closer to your pickup truck than to your children. Prop
Dustin Slade
Jul 24 min read
Protecting Intellectual Property and Data Rights in Federal Aerospace and Defense Contracts
Intellectual property and data rights are among the most technically complex and financially consequential issues in federal aerospace and defense contracting. When companies deliver technical data or computer software developed in whole or in part with government funding—or in collaboration with national laboratories—the allocation of rights can significantly affect both current contract performance and future commercial opportunities. Understanding the governing rules, anti
Dustin Slade
Jul 14 min read
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