Regulatory Compliance & Risk Management

Our approach

The environmental regulatory climate is unpredictable and rapidly changing.

As complex regulatory issues arise regularly under federal and state environmental statutes, clients need counsel that understands all facets of the regulatory industry and can manage the risks. Our practice covers air and water pollution control, hazardous and solid waste management, accidental releases of oil and hazardous substances, state and federal Superfund matters and asbestos abatement.

We offer a competitive edge, having daily involvement with federal and state environmental agencies. We know them. They know us.

We solve challenges efficiently, working with clients to design and implement compliance assessment programs and environmental, health and safety management systems, resolving the issues identified in our findings.

With technically complex permitting, remediation and regulatory compliance issues, our highly qualified in-house team of environmental scientists and engineers goes the extra mile for our clients. We also offer services from writing internal audit manuals to conducting auditor training and assisting with TSCA compliance.

We work with

• Technology companies
• Manufacturers
• Large corporations
• Universities
• Electric, gas and water utilities
• Energy companies
• Hospitals and medical centers
• Waste management companies

Recent experience

• Represent a client on numerous U.S. and international site investigations/remediations and general regulatory and transactional support. We led complex RCRA/CERCLA facility closure process and demolition and sale of former manufacturing facilities, brownfields/voluntary cleanup and mediated settlements.
• Serve as lead environmental counsel for environmental compliance, remediation and auditing of manufacturing facilities across the U.S. and as counsel on multiple federal and state Superfund matters.
• Performed comprehensive environmental, health and safety audits for a large Northeastern utility of its electric production and distribution facilities and its environmental management system.
• Represent a leading car rental company as national environmental counsel handling environmental transactional, regulatory, contractual, petroleum bulk storage issues and related claims.
• Negotiated on behalf of a manufacturing company a voluntary clean-up agreement with a state agency to remediate environmental conditions created during a century of operations. The client achieved a cost savings with a clean-up approach that focused remediation on prospective future uses of the site.
• Developed and implemented a strategy that addressed state agency concerns to treat groundwater expected to be generated during construction of a client’s plant expansion. As a result, it was unnecessary for the client to test the groundwater and was granted the approval to proceed with construction.
• Developed the legal and technical strategy that led to a one half-million dollar reduction in the client’s Superfund response costs reimbursement demanded by the EPA. Caps were also negotiated on the amount of reimbursement future response costs for the remedial phase of the client’s project and we helped it recover insurance for its costs.
• Represented an energy client by conducting an internal investigation into facility emissions monitoring issues and successfully resolved the enforcement matter with both the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and EPA Region 5.
• Represented Tampa Electric in the successful settlement of the federal government’s New Source Review enforcement case challenging the company’s routine maintenance practices at its coal-fired power plants in Florida.
• Represented Rochester Gas and Electric Corporation in securing an amendment to EPA’s PSD and NANSR regulations to broadly exclude alternative fuel generated from municipal solid waste from the definition of “modification.”
• Represented a waste-to-energy client seeking to level the regulatory playing field by getting EPA to issue guidance to the regions and states that municipal solid waste landfills were stationary sources of air emissions subject to NSR regulation as waste-to-energy facilities.
• Challenged final NPDES permits for four electric generating facilities containing water quality-based limits that would have been difficult to meet. We subsequently negotiated interim limits based upon statistical analyses of the current discharge quality.
• Conducted environmental audits in Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Canada, Mexico and countries in South America and Europe.