Our environmental litigators represent clients at the highest levels, including the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as in administrative hearings and settlement negotiations across the U.S. and around the world. With one of the most sophisticated environmental litigation and toxic tort practice in the U.S., we handle litigation and appeals of environmental liabilities in all forums, and under all statutory and regulatory schemes, including actions brought by the government or citizens’ groups involving the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), Clean Air Act (CAA), Clean Water Act (CWA), Rivers and Harbors Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), state environmental statutes, and toxic tort claims.
Litigation
We try cases throughout the United States for plaintiffs and defendants and have litigated some of the most important environmental cases in the country. Our clients include consumer and industrial product manufacturers, individuals, railroads, local governments, transportation companies, electric utilities, and chemical manufacturers. We also represent clients in environmental indemnity litigation, including industry-specific indemnity work, such as “environmental defect” arbitration called for by exploration and production documentation.
Our team – which includes fellows of the American College of Trial Lawyers, a former senior trial counsel in U.S. DOJ’s Environmental Enforcement Section, numerous former judicial clerks, and litigators with advanced degrees in science – has a deep understanding of air quality modeling, epidemiology, toxicology, hydrogeology, and a range of other scientific skills and areas that help us better represent our clients. We regularly file and defend challenges to expert testimony in Daubert and related hearings in state and federal courts. While science and technology are important in environmental cases, we believe the most important strategy is to communicate science and the law to judges, juries, and other decision-makers simply and effectively.
Our experience on both plaintiff and defendant sides of cases allows us to understand how each side thinks and prepares. Additionally, our attorneys serve as coordinating counsel, supervising law firms in other states in the development of trial strategy and conducting mass settlement negotiations. We can harness adjacent skill sets across practice groups, including organizing amici and intervenor coalitions, leveraging state Attorneys General, and working closely with environmental agency staff at both federal and state levels.
Enforcement Defense
Our environmental lawyers have decades of experience representing clients facing actual or potential enforcement actions, whether civil or criminal, and whether because of citizen or employee complaints, agency inspections, historical releases resulting in a corrective action process, or unanticipated upsets, exceedances, or releases. As soon as our clients receive a notice of violation or other enforcement action, we mobilize to best position our clients. In many cases, we have headed off formal enforcement actions entirely, and coordinated the informal resolution of alleged violations to prevent negative publicity or impact on the client’s compliance history.
