Our environmental lawyers frequently act as trusted advisors, ensuring that our clients understand the environmental risks associated with business opportunities. So, we often perform pre-transaction due diligence, working with qualified engineers and other consultants to identify potential issues, and then working with our extensive regulatory agency contacts to devise reasonable solutions to those issues.

When our lawyers identify risks, they can also help to quantify those risks and devise effective and creative risk allocation and risk management strategies to manage, insure over or shift those risks. Because of our nationwide environmental insurance experience, we can also negotiate for specific provisions and tailored language in environmental insurance policies.

We also negotiate with other contractual parties for appropriate indemnity provisions, representations and warranties, and escrows that are tailored to our client’s needs and the risks they are taking.

As a result of this broad experience, our team is particularly well known for its ability to enable the successful acquisition and rehabilitation of prime properties that are contaminated.

Whenever necessary, we can pursue or defend cost recovery actions related to environmental contamination as well. In fact, we have obtained many significant recoveries for our clients, including multi-million dollar insurance settlements and multi-million dollar recoveries from other responsible parties.

For those clients with ongoing operations that present potential environmental risks, we also perform sophisticated, practical, environmental audits.

Some of the many types of environmental issues that our lawyers have successfully resolved, often without need of litigation, include those relating to or arising from:

• PRP and Superfund issues;
• Contaminated building materials, such as mold and asbestos;
• Vapor intrusion from soil and/or groundwater;
• Clean water and clean air issues generally;
• Issues associated with “emerging contaminants, such as 1,4-dioxane and PFOAs; and
• Potential violations of TSCA, FIFRA and other federal or state environmental statutes.