Environmental

Full range of services

• Representing, advising, and negotiating for, purchasers, sellers, lessors, leasees, and lenders in commercial real estate transactions, involving environmental due diligence, insurance coverage, indemnities, escrows, Brownfields Covenants Not To Sue, and environmental remediations (including fixed cost and liability transfer cleanups).
• Litigating complex cost recovery and property damage cases.
• Negotiating and developing transactional documents for the acquisition, sale and financing of contaminated properties.
• Guiding clients in regulatory compliance matters.
• Defending environmental service companies and professionals against malpractice claims, agency enforcement orders, and disciplinary actions.
• Advising and representing environmental service companies and professionals on contracts, collections, and risk transfer/ fixed cost matters.
• Issuing coverage opinions for and providing a defense for insureds in environmental insurance matters.

Experience counts
Our environmental attorneys are routinely relied upon during the course of real estate transactions, to identify, mitigate and/or transfer environmental risks in a manner that advances and promotes closing.

Our team of attorneys has a national reputation for representing clients in determining responsibility for the release of hazardous substances, representing parties in proceedings and negotiations before state and federal environmental agencies, negotiating settlements culminating in the issuance of administrative orders and consent decrees for the clean-up of hazardous waste sites, and defending environmental services companies, engineers and consulting firms against malpractice claims.

We represent parties before state and federal courts, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and other federal and state agencies.  Our attorneys have represented clients in states throughout the East Coast, including Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

Our attorneys were closely involved in the drafting of innovative revisions to Massachusetts superfund law which effectively privatized many aspects of the hazardous waste clean-up and remediation process, including establishing a program for Licensed Site Professionals (LSPs) to oversee and monitor the remediation process.  We served as special counsel to the Board of Registration of Hazardous Waste Site Clean-up Professionals and drafted the Board’s regulations governing LSPs.  Massachusetts is the first state to implement laws privatizing environmental clean-up, and is already considered a model for other states.

Our Environmental Group has substantial experience in hazardous waste management and clean-up, as well as environmental permitting and enforcement, involving CERCLA, RCRA, CWA, TSCA, WPA, Conservation Commission bylaws and M.G.L. c. 21E, 21A and 21J.

We work closely with environmental consultants, hydrogeologists, engineers, toxicologists, chemists, and site remediation consultants in connection with site assessments, studies, risk assessments and remediation activities.

Representative cases

• We represented the sellers of a medical office building, and were responsible for the selection of contractors and installation of a new wastewater treatment system post-closing using funds held back from the sale proceeds.
• We represented the owner of a 100-unit apartment complex in negotiating Consent Order with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection permitting the consolidation of multiple septic systems into a consolidated wastewater treatment system.
• We were part of a national environmental services company team of professionals, utilized to achieve one of the nation’s foremost risk transfer/fixed cost clean-ups.
• We coordinated all the local, state and federal environmental permitting of a manufacturing facility, which produces an indispensable product, utilized worldwide in the pharmaceutical and food industries.
• We represented a privately held manufacturing corporation in the purchase, for its New England corporate headquarters, of a strategically located Brownfields property.  To mitigate our client’s environmental risks, we obtained environmental indemnities from a Fortune 100 corporation, and a Brownfields Covenant Not To Sue from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
• We assisted an industrial client in selling its former chief manufacturing facility, now a Brownfields.  The sale was to a municipal redevelopment authority, which assumed all environmental remediation obligations.
• We developed a fixed cost remediation strategy for a valuable, centrally located commercial office complex.  The strategy enabled the contaminated complex to be successfully marketed prior to completion of remediation.
• Town Water District v. W. R. Grace.  Filed three years prior to the Woburn case, this environmental suit for pollution of the town’s water supply was the first major pollution suit against W. R. Grace in the country.  We represented the plaintiff and handled the case from the filing of the Complaint through the settlement.
• Represented a company and individual against two major utility companies and an administrative claim by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.  Clean-up costs are $2 Million.
• We routinely represent property owners and real estate developers in the acquisition, sale and financing of contaminated properties, and we develop environmental risk transfer strategies employing indemnities, escrows, environmental insurance and the fixed cost/liability transfer approach to remediation.
• Represented a Massachusetts municipality in a Superfund cost recovery action against the polluters of the town wells.  We litigated in federal court, over the course of 14 years, worked closely with the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, and obtained relief in the form of a substitute drinking water supply well and a settlement with the defendants.
• Defended a now international environmental services company against a malpractice claim, culminating in one of the largest jury trials in Massachusetts and a favorable verdict.
• Represented Massachusetts Licensed Site Professionals (LSPs) before the LSP Board.

Our clients include:
Businesses
Property Owners
Real Estate Developers
Municipalities
Environmental Service Companies and Professionals
Insurance Carriers

Environmental: Related Services Areas

Environmental: Professionals

Environmental: Publications