Called Shots

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IRC Legal Business Brief — Block No. 09: Called Shots

Date:

July 7, 2026

Author:

Ian R. Cohen

Founder & Principal Attorney

Block No. 09 - Called Shots

A lawyer on X said he takes zero demand letters seriously. Anthropic built the most powerful AI model the world has ever seen. It lasted three days. I filed a brief to defend 3.8 million bitcoin and wallet addresses started moving. And somewhere between a championship parade, a Yankees game, and Father’s Day with my three boys, I remembered what all of this is actually for.

Business - I’ll Sue You

A lawyer I follow on X posted something recently that caught my attention. He said he’s at the point where he takes zero demand letters seriously. Doesn’t believe the other side is prepared to litigate until they actually file.

That should be a client decision.

I’m a dealmaker. I bring parties together and facilitate transactions. That’s what I’ve done since law school. But when a deal goes sideways - when someone decides they don’t have to pay for the benefit of their bargain - I don’t just write strongly worded letters and hope for the best.

I had a client come to me with a straightforward employment dispute. The labor laws on wages are clear. The former employer botched the termination and owed money. I sent a letter laying out the claim: roughly $100,000. The response from the other side was silence. No engagement. No counteroffer. No acknowledgment.

Their lawyer apparently takes zero demand letters seriously too.

So we filed. And here’s what silence buys you: the claim has grown from $100,000 to over $300,000 as penalties, interest, and additional causes of action stack up. Every month they ignore it, the number climbs. The labor laws are designed that way. The legislature wanted employers to take these obligations seriously, and the statute rewards employees whose employers don’t.

I’m not someone who likes to threaten. It may be perceived that way, but I just try to tell it like it is and play out what happens next. If I send you a letter that says a lawsuit is coming, the only thing standing in the way is my client’s patience.

Take my words seriously. And literally.

AI - It Was All a Dream

On June 9, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5: a public version of Mythos, their most powerful model ever built. It was state-of-the-art on nearly every benchmark. Software engineering, scientific research, knowledge work, vision. The longer and more complex the task, the larger its lead over everything else.

It lasted three days.

Fable shipped with safety classifiers that redirected sensitive requests (e.g., cybersecurity, biology, chemistry) to an older model, Claude Opus 4.8. Within 24 hours, a jailbreak researcher who calls himself “Pliny the Liberator” defeated those classifiers using multi-agent decomposition and leaked the model’s 120,000-character system prompt.

On June 12, the Commerce Department invoked the Export Control Reform Act and forced Anthropic to shut it all down worldwide. The safeguards were built in from day one. They got defeated in 24 hours.

Fable 5 is back online. Whether that means we are at the doorstep of AGI or the shutdown was mainly political, I can’t tell you. But the world isn’t ready and the only answer is to do the reading. So I asked Claude to build my summer list based on my career, life and ambitions. Here’s what it says I should read:

Play Bigger - Ramadan, Peterson, Lochhead, Maney
Never Split the Difference - Voss
$100M Offers - Hormozi
The Sovereign Individual - Davidson, Rees-Mogg
Broken Money - Alden
Markets in Profile - Dalton
The Victory Lab - Issenberg
Unreasonable Hospitality - Guidara
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Horowitz
Wanting - Burgis

Which one should I tackle first? Reply and tell me.

Bitcoin - In the Courtroom

Since I filed my proposed amicus brief in the $250 billion Bitcoin case over a month ago, things have moved.

I joined Thomas Paccia and Arbedout at Pubkey for Coin Based to discuss the case. I got to cite a Tupac Shakur case in an opposition to a motion, which is a career highlight I didn’t see coming. I’ve been cited in the media for forging an independent battle to save the integrity of bitcoin. And I’ve heard from many in the bitcoin community. Some names you’d know and others who are probably just pulling my leg.

Then the wallet addresses moved bitcoin.

Last week, reports surfaced that 52 of the named wallets in the case moved 34,335 BTC. If wallets are moving, they aren’t abandoned. That’s the whole ballgame for the plaintiff’s lost property theory, and it cuts in the direction I’ve been arguing.

Counsel for Noah Doe also submitted a motion asking the court to lift its stay. They’re trying to flip the July 14 hearing: instead of the plaintiffs proving why I shouldn’t be heard, they want me to explain why I should be. I already explained that in my brief.

I responded supporting the court’s initial decision to stay the proceedings. I further requested the court compel the plaintiff to reveal their identity to continue pursuing the case. The Court agreed with me. And a defendant showed up. The Digital Chamber also stepped up with an amicus brief last night. July 14 is one week away. I’m preparing, and I plan to be there to say my piece.

IRC - The Life and Times

Knicks in 5. I ended the last Brief with those words. I ended my Coin Based appearance with them too. And then it actually happened.

I watched Game 5 at a local pub with my wife and close friends. Confidence of victory followed by actual victory. Jalen Brunson’s Knicks brought a championship back to New York for the first time since 1973. There’s a buzz to this city that hasn’t been felt in a while.

I needed to get back to my first love, the Yankees. I took in my first game of the season where Brunson and Josh Hart threw out the first pitch, went into the YES booth to meet Paul O’Neill, then sat in the Steinbrenner Box waving to the crowd. The Yankees won. The victory parade marches on.

Then came the parade itself. I made it to the Canyon of Heroes before dawn. Jalen’s float stopped right in front of me and he jumped off carrying the trophy. The ticker tape whirled the entire time. I’ve now seen three of my teams win championship trophies: Knicks, Yankees, and Rangers.

But the best part of those two weeks was Sunday. Father’s Day with my three boys. Lou Gehrig said he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth. He ain’t got shit on me. My oldest is about to leave for sleep away camp for the first time this weekend. That’s a milestone I wasn’t sure would come. My middle son had his moving up ceremony from Kindergarten and is getting big enough to have real opinions. And the baby is moving quickly, which means I’m starting to run again.

One more team to go. With summer here, it’s time for the Jets to join them. This time of year it’s always the Jets’ year.