Block No. 12
Date:
October 13, 2026
Author:
Ian R. Cohen
/
Founder & Principal Attorney
Block No. 12 - Proof of Work
A brand tried to walk out of its warehouse in two weeks without doing the work to get there. A new client found me through a chatbot because of pages I’ve been writing, not knowing who would read them. The dollar in your pocket is designed to buy less every year, on purpose. And I spent a week saying yes to every room I was invited into, including one with a microphone.
Business - Two Weeks’ Notice
When I was in-house General Counsel at an e-commerce and logistics company, one of our fulfillment clients, a consumer brand with thousands of SKUs on our shelves, sent us an email. They weren’t renewing. They wanted every unit out of our warehouse in two weeks.
It doesn’t work that way.
Thousands of SKUs don’t walk out the door because someone put a deadline in an email. Every one of them has to be located, counted, picked, packed, palletized and reconciled against what the brand thinks is there. And this brand had never come onto our warehouse management system. There was no clean inventory record to hand back, because they’d never given us what we needed to build one. The two-week exit they wanted started with an audit nobody had planned for.
Then there were the invoices. They owed us a lot of money, and they hadn’t paid.
So here’s a company on its way out, behind on its bills, telling the vendor holding its inventory to drop everything and move faster. They had the leverage backwards. Under the UCC, a warehouse generally holds a lien on stored goods for unpaid charges.
The party sitting on your product and your past-due invoices is not the one under pressure. They chose demands. It didn’t go well for them.
The right way is almost boring. Read the termination and offboarding terms before you send the notice. Pay what you owe, or put a real plan on the table. Ask for a joint transition plan with a realistic timeline, a reconciliation process, and an answer on who pays for the extra labor. And treat the warehouse team like the people who’ve been handling your product for years, because they have.
Leaving a vendor is a negotiation like any other, and the brand walking out usually has the weaker hand. The work you put in on the way in, onboarding properly and keeping the account current, is what you get to spend on the way out.
You can’t demand your way past work you never did.
AI - Found by a Machine
A new client recently told me how they found me. Not a referral. Not Google. They asked ChatGPT who to call, and my name came back.
I didn’t pay for that. What I did do, over the past couple of months, was write down the answers to the questions clients actually ask me, in plain English, one page per question. What Hybrid Counsel is. How to sell a business out of an estate. What an option pool does to your cap table. Then I added structured data so a machine could read them, and a plain-text file that tells AI crawlers what’s on the site and who it’s for.
None of that was clever. It was work.
Here’s what is happening. Search engines ranked pages. AI models assemble answers, and they assemble them from whatever is specific, consistent and checkable. A law firm homepage that says “experienced, results-driven counsel” gives a model nothing to work with. A page that walks through how an earnout gets disputed gives it something to cite.
That cuts both ways. These models are confident when they’re wrong, and somebody out there is getting a bad recommendation right now. But the inputs are the part you control. If your expertise isn’t written down anywhere a machine can find it, you don’t exist in the answer.
Word of mouth rewards who you know. This version rewards what you’ve published.
Show your work. Somebody’s model is reading it.
Bitcoin - Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees
A store of value does one job: it holds its purchasing power over time. Put it away today, take it out in 10 years, and it buys roughly what it bought when you put it away. That only works if the thing can’t be degraded, destroyed or diluted.
Money moves value across two dimensions, space and time. The dollar is great at space. You can wire it, Venmo it or tap a card. It’s bad at time.
A dollar from 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was created, buys about three cents of goods today. That isn’t the system failing. It’s the system doing what it was built to do.
Since 2012 the Fed has had an official target of 2% inflation a year. Two percent sounds harmless. Run the math: at 2%, prices double about every 36 years. Save across a career, and the stated policy is that your savings buy half as much when you retire. And 2% is only the target. From early 2020 to early 2022, the M2 money supply grew about 40%. Everyone feels that squeeze.
So does money grow on trees? For the government, close enough. The biggest debtor in the world benefits most when each dollar is worth less, because inflation shrinks the real weight of what it owes. It’s a tax nobody votes on.
Back in Block 02 I called the dollar a melting ice cube. This is the thermostat, and somebody else sets it.
Bitcoin has no thermostat. The supply schedule is in the code, and no one can print more to cover a deficit. Nothing about it rusts, rots or dilutes. A coin mined in 2009 is the same coin today, provided you hold the keys.
Space and time. The dollar moves across one. Bitcoin moves across both.
IRC - The Life and Times
This was the week I said yes to everything.
BeyondCPG Track 7 kicked off in the city, and I got my team: a beverage brand I’ll be mentoring for the next 12 weeks. Later that week I sat in on a panel about fractional executives, which is a strange thing to do when you are one. Then the New York Lawyers Affinity Group, where Zoom dropped me into breakout rooms with lawyers from Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, Washington and New Jersey.
In between, one-on-ones, follow-ups, and enough coffee to keep a small co-packer in business.
One more yes. I’m launching a podcast called Assumption of Risk. It’s a show for lawyers and the people who hire them: war stories and hot takes. The stuff lawyers only talk about after the client leaves the room.
None of it bills. All of it is the job.
People ask how a solo practice gets referrals. There isn’t a trick. You show up, you listen more than you talk, you follow up the next morning, and you do it again week after week. Most of it doesn’t pay off for months, and you never know which conversation will.
A reputation works like a blockchain. Every block points back to the one before it, and nobody can mine it for you.
The Links
Worth your time:
UCC § 7-209: The warehouse lien, in the statute’s own words.
Ask IRC Legal: The plain-English answers the machines keep finding.
The IRC Legal Live Business Briefing: Markets, Bitcoin, macro, housing and the headlines, refreshing all day.
I’ll catch you at the next block.
-Ian R. Cohen
Founder and Principal Attorney - IRC Legal
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Block No. 12 | Originally Published Block No. 971237
This edition was originally sent to subscribers of The IRC Legal Business Brief.
Read the original on Beehiiv →
