2025 In Review
Heading into the holiday season, now is a good moment to highlight some of the posts on this blog from the past year. Our ambitions for this blog always exceed the time we have to fulfill them, but there are still are a number of posts we are proud of and resources that are hopefully useful for a long time (and a handful of diatribes that will hopefully one day seem like a relic of the moment).
If you haven’t already read these, we encourage you to check them out. And, there's is always more over on the Defending Equity Initiative Resources page.
Hopefully, 2026 brings some brighter news, and we wish all of our readers, clients, and friends a restful holiday season.
In no particular order, our posts this year featured:
A detailed series of posts intended as a DIY-ish resource for forming a nonprofit — whether to do it, how to make a for-profit/non-profit affiliate relationship work, Articles of Incorporation, Bylaws and other corporate documents, preparing and filing the tax-exemption application, and getting all of the other filings done (by our superstar Managing Paralegal, Michelle Leung). As public resources go, we think there is a ton of useful information and free samples in here, and hope people doing it themselves give the posts a read.
Our MLC Compliance leader, Patrick Hogan, attended the 2026 the annual conference of the National Association of State Charity Officials and provided a great writeup of what he heard and learned about charitable regulators (i.e. state Attorneys General) are thinking about the charitable sector. Patrick’s growth of the MLC Compliance work is very impressive, and you can hear (and see!) him talk about that work here.
Patrick also continued writing about another one of his specialties: the 501(c)(7) social club — both in the context of self-declaring vs. applying for tax-exempt status and staying within non-member income limits. This area of practice is full of surprising rules and I don’t know anyone who has thought more about them than Patrick — really helpful stuff if you are setting up this kind of organization or already have one.
It would not be 2025 without a set of real downer topics — sorry, but these are all really important, and not just now.
I chimed in with a post on nonprofit dissolution in California, a process that is harder than you would think and something you should either hire a lawyer for or at least do very carefully and thoughtfully using that post and the resources it links to as a guide.
Daniel Lac, leader of our MLC Employment practice, addressed the reality that with the loss of funding, many organizations had to make significant cuts and wrote a very helpful piece on how to try to avoid reductions in force and the related legal considerations.
Patrick addressed the very common reality of automatic revocation and, more hopefully, how to avoid it and what it takes to get reinstated.
Finally, in ‘man yells at clouds’, I addressed the threats from the administration a few different times on somewhat varied topics. I wrote about what I see as the wrong way to manage these threats, the what I’d describe as the best-ignored pathetic fascism of the new public service loan forgiveness regulations, the way we intend to use Defending Equity Initiative to help progressive nonprofits resist threats to the extent they become real, and a rejection of the focus on philanthropic freedom as the cause du jour.
We hope that next year we can touch on even more topics and provide a wider variety of useful resources for the sector.
