Explore how environmental law is applied within these practice contexts.
Advising
Advise
- Private clients on how to navigate and comply with myriad environmental regulations.
- Government. agencies on how to create effective environmental regulatory schemes and how to enforce them lawfully
- Non-profits on strategies for protecting the environment
Effective advisors understand the intricacies of both environmental statutes and their client’s business or mission.
Transactions
- Consider and address environmental liability obligations in structuring deals
- Negotiate with regulatory officials and document settlements to increase certainty for their clients
- Work collaboratively with business and commercial lawyers to evaluate environmental liabilities in sales, purchases, or corporate restructurings
- Conduct environmental due diligence investigations evaluating, quantifying, and allocating environmental risks
Disputes
- Deal with complex administrative hearings and civil litigation in big cases that typically last many years
and involve complex scientific evidence
- Engage in pre-trial discovery, extensive motion practice, and complex negotiations
- Prosecute or defend criminal cases involving environmental crimes, occasionally
Examples
- Environmental disaster complex litigation after events like the BP Gulf Oil Spill
- Energy project advocacy in regulatory and pre-litigation settings to influence
projects like Keystone Pipeline or coal export terminals
- Emission permit negotiations with government agencies (e.g. under the Clean Water Act or Clean Air Act)
- Toxic torts actions to compensate individual victims of environmental violations
Public Policy
- Draft legislation and debate proposed statutes
- Draft or comment on new or proposed regulations
- Pursue long-term litigation strategies to shape judicial interpretation of statutes and the common law
- Offer solutions for problems that emerge as science sheds new light on the way humans interact with the natural world