We focus our practice on helping clients to comply with the complex maze of environmental regulations at both the federal and state levels, and to minimize the expense and liability associated with clean-up and remediation projects. Our goals are to solve your immediate legal problem, to understand your long-term business objectives and to help you achieve those objectives efficiently and without litigation. We keep abreast of pending legislation and regulatory developments, anticipate potential problems specific to your business, and recommend solutions to protect you from or defend you in the event of inadvertent violations.

Understanding Your Business and the Regulatory/Judicial Process

We represent manufacturers, lenders, insurance companies, public utilities, property developers, owners, owners, brokers, and individuals across the spectrum of environmental law - from transactional matters to litigation (including regulatory enforcement proceedings, private cost-recovery actions, and suits for toxic injury to persons and property). The variety of our clients has given us experience with a broad range of organizational structures as well as a knowledge of manufacturing processes and of wholesale and retail distribution operations.

Included in our ranks is an attorney who helped form the U.S. Department of Energy, and subsequently has extensive knowledge of the administrative procedures involved in policy development, rulemaking, variance, and enforcement proceedings.

We also have extensive trial experience in both federal and state courts handling an array of cases from toxic tort litigation to injunction, cost recovery, and criminal actions. Our depth of experience dramatically reduces our learning curve, minimizing the time needed to understand the impact of environmental regulations on your specific business operations, and enabling us to immediately dedicate ourselves to working on your case.

The Specifics of our Practice

We counsel you to identify the most cost-effective manner of complying with the requirements of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, RCRA, CERCLA (Superfund) and OSHA (and state analogs), with California's Proposition 65, Asbestos Notification Law, and with CEQA.

When necessary, we represent you in a variety of administrative proceedings before numerous governmental agencies, including the EPA, the Corps of Engineers, the California Department of Health Services, State and Regional Water Quality Control Boards, Air Quality Management Districts, city fire departments, county health departments, and district attorney offices.

Recently, we have successfully represented clients' interests in a broad array of cases involving such issues as toxic gases, leaking underground gasoline storage tanks, Superfund cleanups, sales and leases of contaminated property, NPDES discharge violations, soil and groundwater contamination, hazardous waste management facilities permits, PCB transformer fires, environmental impact statements, asbestos in buildings, underground injection well violations, wetlands development, TSCA compliance, pesticides registration and reporting under SARA, Title III.

We also negotiate consultants' site investigation and remediation contracts to ensure that the work is organized efficiently, effectively and without increased risk to you. We evaluate their performance in asbestos abatement projects, hazardous waste and underground storage tank removal projects, soil and groundwater remediation, and risk assessment.

Further, we conduct due diligence investigations and audits to assess the environmental risks associated with purchasing or selling your commercial real estate or manufacturing facilities. Finally, to help you avoid lofty fines, we assist with internal audits and help you institute procedures to comply with environmental laws and regulations.

We also help to protect your interests by negotiating and structuring commercial transactions that clearly allocate each party's financial responsibility for both known and potential environmental liabilities. And we assist financial institutions and commercial agents in structuring loan transactions to protect against lender and broker liability.