Polsinelli Shughart attorneys are skilled advocates for our clients in complex environmental litigation. Our clients benefit from our environmental litigation attorneys’ deep substantive understanding of the interface between environmental regulation and the business sector. This knowledge springs from decades of experience in operational, permitting, licensing, transactional, legislative and rule-making processes at the federal and state levels. The Environmental Litigation practice group is reinforced by the firm’s results-driven Trial Department - a critical resource for risk management and addressing the challenging, highly technical scientific issues that overlay the evolving regulatory schemes and principles in environmental law.
We are trial attorneys with a reputation for understanding and litigating complex technical issues. Our foremost focus, however, is centered on our clients’ business objectives. We understand that “winning” hard-fought litigation is not an end in and of itself. It is a means to an end defined by our client, and executed as a result of solid legal counsel and advice. Our decades of experience in resolving environmental disputes, combined with our strong business sense and creative thinking, enable us to perceive and strategize outcomes and alternatives beyond the ordinary and obvious.
We also know the importance of providing our clients the best information and advice possible to facilitate sound business judgments and risk management. The breadth and depth of our experience allows us to highlight potential outcomes on an ongoing basis as the dispute unfolds. We strive to keep our clients informed of all developments in litigation, and to bring immediate awareness to our clients of events, both internal and external to the dispute, requiring evaluation of ongoing strategy, risk, and cost projections.
Our capabilities extend through a broad range of areas of environmental law in federal and state courts throughout the United States. We are experienced in the defense and prosecution of cost recovery, contribution, and citizen suit cases of varying size and complexity in federal and state court. We have litigated private and governmental claims under a wide variety of statutory schemes, including CERCLA, RCRA, CWA, CAA, NEPA and analogous state statutes, as well as common-law claims.
In addition, we regularly counsel and defend clients in responding to civil enforcement cases before administrative bodies and federal and state courts alleging violations of environmental laws and regulations. When necessary, we also draw on the experience of Polsinelli Shughart’s white-collar criminal defense team in responding to allegations of environmental crimes.