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Zachary Swartz outlines how in-house legal teams can proactively guide their companies through today’s heightened economic, geopolitical, and regulatory volatility, offering practical strategies to manage risk, maintain stability, and ensure clear communication amid uncertainty.

On April 2, 2025, President Donald Trump announced a new tariff regime under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (“IEEPA”), citing national security concerns. This regime includes a 10 percent baseline tariff for all countries and higher “reciprocal tariffs” for approximately 90 countries, effective April 5, and April 9, 2025, with additional potential tariffs threatened in the future. The new tariffs would significantly impact corporations, particularly those with supply-chain exposure in China and other Southeastern Asian countries.

In the latest instance of a private equity seller vindicating contractual rights in the Delaware Court of Chancery, on April 30, Vice Chancellor Lori W. Will rejected attempts by minority LLC members in urgent care provider CityMD to avoid the clear terms of their LLC agreement by urging the court to impose fiduciary duty-type obligations on the majority owner and seller, Warburg Pincus, LLC and funds it controls (“WP Investors”).

On April 28, 2025, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia (“EDVA”) and the U.S. Department of Justice’s (“DOJ”) Civil Rights Division (“CRT”) announced the formation of the Eastern District of Virginia Equal Access to Banking Task Force.

On April 17, 2025, a federal district court denied a motion to dismiss the first government enforcement action brought in decades under the Robinson-Patman Act (“RPA”), a statute that prohibits price discrimination and other anticompetitive distribution practices.

On April 14, 2025, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) obtained a high-profile “wage-fixing” conviction under the Sherman Act against a former executive of multiple home health care agencies (“HHAs”).

The Texas Legislature has been debating several bills aimed at boosting dispatchable power in ERCOT while erecting new economic and permitting barriers for renewables.

Not long after starting his second term, U.S. President Donald J. Trump announced tariffs on numerous imports from some of the nation’s major trading counterparties, with tariff amounts varying depending on the country and commodity type.

Delaware amended the Delaware General Corporation Law (the “DGCL”) to create safe harbors for transactions involving directors, officers and controlling stockholders and to limit both the documents subject to and the purposes of books and records requests.

In a move that perhaps comes as no surprise, on March 27, 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC” or “the Commission”) issued Press Release 2025-58 announcing it had voted to end its defense of its climate-related disclosures rules (The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors).

On March 14, 2025, President Trump signed legislation disapproving the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation implementing the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.

If past is prologue, while the second Trump administration is expected to take a number of actions that could lead to increased volatility with respect to renewable identification number (“RIN”) prices just as the first did, there are signals that the administration may take a more deliberate approach this time to reduce shocks to the RIN market, all the more given the interest in supporting renewable fuel production as a domestic fuel source. And while the California Air Resources Board (“CARB”) took steps last year that impact the ability of biogas projects to generate Low Carbon Fuel Standard (“LCFS”) credits, state legislative headwinds could eventually result in the opening of new environmental credit markets to shore up demand for renewable natural gas (“RNG”). Overall, while significant uncertainty and risk of RIN volatility remains, there continue to be signals from both the federal executive and legislative branches in support of the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (“RFS”).