We help our clients successfully pioneer and employ the vast and diverse uses of technology for virtual/digital currencies and blockchain solutions. The multi-disciplinary practice that characterizes so much of our work means we are well-suited to help our clients navigate the challenge of adapting this new framework of blockchain based protocols in the face of uncertain regulatory and statutory directives at the federal and state level. We continue to be excited about blockchain’s transformative potential in some of our core, long-time, practice areas including renewable energy and energy efficiency, contracts and commerce and sustainable communities, among others, and can advise on the regulatory, contracts, tax, securities and other legal issues which arise on a frequent basis.

Because our backgrounds and prior representations give us the insight of practical business and/or nonprofit/governmental perspectives (as the case may be) in all our work, we are especially sensitive to the need to deploy blockchain and digital technology in a cost-effective and creative way.

That means being able to figure out, ahead of the curve, where there may be intersections with regulatory or other requirements and to plan compliance in an efficient manner.

BCK Firm President Jeff Bernstein has counseled clients investing in digital currencies and in funds as well as in a variety of blockchain solutions ranging from sustainable energy platforms to secure contracts and financial transactions. We understand and can think creatively about the legal issues which emerge daily. Blockchain technology is now being used to build tools and infrastructure that help lawyers draft contracts, record commercial transactions, and verify legal documents. We are also interested in the use of smart contracts that can be executed on the blockchain and using permissioned blockchain to increase the integrity of financial and other transactions.

• Money Transmitting Licensing;

• Money Services Business Compliance;

• Decentralized Ledger Technology;

• Business Operations and Corporate Formation;

• Privacy and Data Security;

• Unfair Competition and Consumer Protection; and

• Tracking legislative and regulatory developments.

We help business corporations, general and limited partnerships, limited liability companies and other business entities headquartered or formed in Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, California, Delaware and many other states. We offer their directors, officers and shareholders counsel on corporate, commercial and contractual matters and representation in regulatory and judicial litigation. The Firm is especially attuned to the needs of emerging entrepreneurial businesses and non-profits which seek cost-effective and timely provision of legal services to prevent more time- and resource-consuming problems later.

We bring to our representation a thorough understanding of the businesses we represent and a special sensitivity to the challenges facing companies in the challenging economic conditions that exist now. We also serve (or have served) on corporate and non-profit boards of, and in some cases are officers as well, energy, environmental, sustainable development, New Media and other technology companies. We understand the need to solve problems quickly and effectively; we are skilled at adding our legal advice to strategic planning and financing efforts that our clients undertake and work comfortably and productively as part of a team with in-house and outside professionals.

The Firm regularly advises clients on the following matters:

• All legal aspects of the incorporation process and the establishment and operation of business, professional and other corporations and limited liability entities, partnerships or other associations;

• Due diligence and acquisition of, or joint ventures with, other business entities;

• Drafting of contracts, leases, financing and other such documents;

• Corporate management and governance and resolution of internal control issues;

• Laws governing corporate filings;

• Permitting, land use and contractual matters in connection with debt and equity financings, and rendering formal legal opinions;

• State and federal securities requirements for a variety of private placements and other offerings; and

• Responses to COVID-19 issues, whether contract interpretation (e.g. invocation of force majeure and other clauses), restructuring, access to federal and state assistance, compliance with health directives and best practices and a range of issues not contemplated prior to the onset of the Pandemic.

We represent owners, contractors, sureties, subcontractors, design professionals, and manufacturers in public and private sector construction disputes ranging from $25,000 to $4.5 billion in claims.

Our work includes the arbitration or litigation of disputes involving breach of contract and delay, disruption, acceleration, changes in scope of work and other damages, bid disputes, liquidated damages, owner interference, defective performance, wrongful termination, mitigation, betterments, force majeure clauses in the pandemic, mechanic's liens, surety bonds and indemnity.

We also advise clients on contract negotiation and consult on issues of contract bidding, contract performance, contract interpretation, equitable adjustments in delay and disruption and the arbitration and litigation of disputes.

Some of our most recent work includes:

• Bringing actions in arbitration on behalf of a general contractor pertaining to delay damages and breach of contract rights;

• Litigating claims on behalf of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts involving heavy road construction/highway change orders and related rights;

• Negotiating owners' claims in an alleged design defect case;

• Representing and settling subcontractors' claims in a public project involving defective plans, specifications and drawings; and

• Challenging a bid dispute on behalf of a general contractor.

We are also experienced in presenting claims on behalf of general contractors, subcontractors and material suppliers against local and state governments which typically involve particular time sensitive filing dates, contractually imposed schedule requirements, equitable adjustments, change order accounting and pricing claims.

Attorney Stacey L. Cushner also regularly sits as an arbitrator, mediator, and Dispute Review Board member on large, complex construction arbitrations and Dispute Review Boards. BCK Dispute Resolution Services, Inc →

We represent businesses, executives, and individuals in technology, health care, consulting, manufacturing, non-profit and for-profit businesses, start-ups on:

• The Family & Medical Leave Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act;

• Preventing workplace violence;

• Non-compete agreements and the protection of proprietary rights agreements;

• Compliance with state and federal anti-discrimination law;

• Wage hour law in the private and public sectors;

• Overtime requirements under the Fair Labor Standards and state equivalent;

• Wrongful termination;

• Discrimination in the workplace;

• Preventing sexual harassment claims;

• Separation and severance agreements;

• Drafting employment contracts, handbooks, policies and offer letters;

• Risk management; defamation in the workplace and privacy issues; and

• Internal investigations.

We offer aggressive counsel in the event of an employee termination to maximize the client’s position.

We represent clients in mediation, arbitration, court and before governmental agencies in employment disputes. Our client list ranges from large Fortune 500 firms that have needed representation in terminating an executive who breached his fiduciary duty to individual clients who have suffered egregious sexual harassment in mom and pop businesses.

The Firm has extensive expertise in energy and public utilities law. A special focus is the planning, financing and development of renewable energy projects and the sale of the generation and non-generation attributes (renewable energy certificates, emission reduction credits, greenhouse gas offsets and the like) from those projects.

We have represented municipal and private aggregators, governmental entities, energy companies, commercial and industrial consumers and non-profit institutions in a variety of matters before public utility commissions, energy facility siting boards, and other state and federal agencies. We are especially attuned to federal and state legislative developments focused on combating climate change and encouraging the development of, or investments in, wind, solar, low-head and other environmentally benign hydropower, sustainable biomass such as anaerobic digesters, landfill gas, storage and other alternate energy projects as well as energy efficiency efforts around New England and elsewhere in the United States.

A sample of our recent work includes:

The Firm serves as special counsel to the Town of Sandwich, Massachusetts, in its role as

host to the NRG Canal generating plant. As special counsel, the Firm assists the Town in the

negotiation of Host Community Agreements and Tax Valuation Agreements with the owner of the generating plant. The Firm also represents the Town before the Massachusetts Energy

Facilities Siting Board and the Cape Cod Commission in matters concerning the generating plant.

The Firm serves as special counsel to the Town of Medway, Massachusetts in its role as host to a proposed 250-megawatt storage facility. Hearings have concluded and a decision is expected shortly from the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities after the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board declined jurisdiction.

The Firm represents a private non-profit organization, Green Energy Consumers Alliance, Inc., offering green energy products to retail consumers. On behalf of Green Energy (as well as other clients), the Firm has negotiated agreements to purchase renewable energy certificates from wind, solar, landfill gas and other renewable projects and helped to structure a variety of innovative investments designed to promote the development of clean energy resources. The Firm has assisted the client with developing comprehensive program documents relating to the establishment and operation of electric vehicle programs in many states.

The Firm has represented other communities negotiating Host Community Agreements with developers of new merchant wind and fossil-fueled power facilities, electric interconnect facilities, pipelines, electric storage, and other projects. Our strategies are varied and multi-faceted; they emphasize multi-forum proceedings and public outreach to incorporate community concerns and achieve local objectives and consider appropriate environmental mitigation, economic and tax considerations and other measures to assure that the public welfare is benefited, instead of adversely affected, by such projects.

The Firm served as special counsel to a cooperative utility in Vermont, Washington Electric Cooperative, which successfully developed a landfill methane generating facility in Coventry, Vermont at the state’s largest landfill. We helped to negotiate a series of project agreements with the landfill owner, a major EPC construction contract, operating agreements, and others necessary to support this innovative project which provides Co-Op members with extremely competitively priced electricity and the benefits of sales of millions of dollars of Renewable Energy Certificates the project generates.

The Firm successfully assisted a developer of landfill gas-to-energy plants negotiate a power contract, secure financing, and permit a 12 MW plant that was a model from both an energy and environmental perspective. The Firm has represented this client with respect to other projects, including a similar project with a large municipality in Southern California and a limited partnership which has successfully developed projects with investments well more than $75 million.

For many years, the Firm served as General Counsel to a nationally recognized joint powers entity of twenty-one towns and one county with a combined population of a quarter of a million people on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. the Cape Light Compact. The Compact aggregates electric consumers to negotiate new, less expensive, power supply arrangements and implement innovative demand side management and renewable energy programs made possible by deregulation.

The Firm assisted the Compact in the formation of a sister entity, the Cape & Vineyard

Electric Cooperative, Inc., an electric cooperative expressly authorized under the Massachusetts Electric Restructuring Act, for the purposes of entering long-term purchases for wholesale power and owning and operating renewable energy generation facilities such as community wind and solar projects. The Cooperative has successfully developed over 25 MW of solar photovoltaic generating capacity which is up and running and returning benefits to its member communities and their taxpayers and consumers.

We counseled a municipal utility in designing special rates imposing the cost of a system-wide upgrade on those customers causing the demand for the improvements. The Firm then successfully defended these special rates before the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

We have successfully challenged rate design and other practices of their electric utilities on behalf of business customer coalitions as well as public entities and consumer coalitions.

This advocacy resulted in orders which saved tens of millions of dollars for these clients.

We represented an international energy company which purchased and redeveloped a large urban district heating plant which efficiently and cleanly provides steam to neighboring technology, involved the negotiation of a set of interrelated agreements with the owner of a power plant which is the host for our client’s facility as well as customer agreements.

Client stories →

The Firm has advised many municipalities, regional planning bodies, non-profit organizations and others about the impact of large existing or proposed energy facilities such as natural gas pipelines and electric transmission lines, generating stations and the like. We have negotiated host community agreements that imposed conditions on construction and/or operation to preserve environmental, land use and other community values and to fairly recompense our clients for the effects of such facilities. In other cases, we have helped our clients successfully prevent construction of such facilities, or, in some situations, continued operation where reasonable protection of the environment and human health could not be assured, and, where necessary, litigated complex issues in state and federal courts.

For many years we represented the City of Pittsfield which had its prime industrial property contaminated by PCBs. The Firm represented the City in a successful complex mediation which took several years and produced a complex settlement in the form of a Consent Decree which was approved by a Federal District Court, worth in excess of a quarter of a billion dollars as calculated at the time (and now an amount far in excess of that). The Firm also helped devise and implement an innovative, Brownfields redevelopment plan for the Pittsfield Economic Development Authority (https://businesspittsfield.com/peda/) created to administer a portion of the settlement.

The Firm counseled a Berkshires town which opposed the route for a proposed high-pressure natural gas pipeline through sensitive areas. Through multi-forum administrative and judicial litigation, the Firm convinced the proponent to reroute the pipeline and avoid the town altogether, while making significant contributions to a local conservation fund. [LINK TO TOWN OF RICHMOND VIDEO]

The Firm represented the developer of residential housing on a former brownfields site which has garnered widespread acclaim for the sustainable features of the new construction.

The Firm represented a community which took contaminated property for nonpayment of taxes and sought clean-up from the responsible parties so the property could be redeveloped for beneficial uses. The Firm employed a multi-pronged strategy to achieve a negotiated settlement which was quicker and less expensive and thus helped the community achieve its goals years sooner than would otherwise have been the case.

The Firm has helped non-profit organizations successfully preserve extensive parcels of land on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, many with significant natural or other features, and has designed innovative financing and legal strategies to implement these actions. The Firm engaged in multi-forum litigation on behalf of one of these organizations, successfully spearheading opposition to a proposed luxury golf course which would have destroyed the last remaining contiguous woodlands in a designated ”District of Critical Planning Concern.”

We are committed to helping nonprofit organizations grow and achieve their missions. We help guide our nonprofit clients through the complicated landscape of tax and other regulatory systems, legal compliance, and organizational challenges of being a charitable, tax-exempt organization:

• Formation and incorporation;

• Conflicts of interest, including disclosure policies;

• Board matters, including liability, insurance, and fiduciary duties;

• Mergers, acquisitions, asset transfers, and dissolutions;

• Restructuring, reorganizing and joint ventures;

• All types of transactional work, including contracts, leases, licenses, operating agreements, non-compete agreements and confidentiality agreements;

• Land use and intersectional issues (e.g. whether activities are permitted under the terms of special agreements as well as local and state zoning and environmental laws);

• Reporting requirements and tax exemption compliance

We recognize the importance of nonprofit organizations and the vital role they play in our communities, especially at a time with diminished governmental resources for core missions. We also consider pro bono service an essential professional responsibility.

For instance, we represented a new nonprofit in Central New Hampshire, At Eagle Pond, Inc., that seeks to preserve as a local and national landmark the New Hampshire farm where the poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon shared a writing life). It will offer a range of educational and literary programs to explore the work of Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon and, among other things, further conversation about the ways poetry can be a means of finding our bearings in the world.

We are also helping a new nonprofit in Vermont, Green Commons of Vermont, Inc. dedicated to acquiring, preserving and protecting places for community engagement and education around agricultural and food sustainability in these challenging times.

We have been actively involved with a number of farmers’ markets and other food-based businesses, particularly in Vermont and work closely with the Vermont Legal Food Hub at Vermont Law School.

BCK assists its clients interested in promoting sustainable development and technologies by employing legal strategies to achieve sustainable use of natural resources, prevent waste and encourage recycling, site housing appropriately, maximize conservation of natural resources and build energy efficient housing and other development which incorporates, whenever possible, use of non-carbon emitting energy resources. We help clients identify goals - be it promoting local agriculture, cutting energy use, promoting corporate social responsibility, or reuse of materials, buildings, developed land or other such objectives - and devise legal strategies which are effective and economic.

BCK’s practice is uniquely suited to provide the cross-disciplinary approach necessary to promote sustainable development. Our energy, environmental and land use practices, coupled with our special interest and experience in Brownfields development, make us ideally suited to participate in, and advise on, sustainable development strategies. Drawing from our diverse background and prior experience, we can help clients better understand and respond to these issues and integrate them into their business approach.

Whether it is land use planning, new building construction, or using tax and public financial assistance tools, seeking expedited regulatory permitting or other government actions, we can facilitate sustainable development with respect to small or large projects or redevelopments.

We represent farms and other agricultural-based businesses, whether in seeking new markets for their products or understanding how statutes and regulations often enacted decades ago (or more) affect twenty-first century activities. In particular, the Pandemic has dramatically aggravated food insecurity and required new strategies to bring locally based farm and other products where they are most needed. BCK has been on the leading edge of those efforts, assisting new and existing nonprofits and local governments respond to these critical needs.