Environment & Energy | McCarter & English, LLP

Clients across all business segments rely on our Environment & Energy team to help them defend against or resolve disputes, anticipate challenges, and advance important business transactions.

Effectively planning for and responding to new and evolving environmental and energy issues is increasingly important to clients’ continued success.

Whether finding solutions to environmental claims, assisting in structuring and negotiating energy or energy infrastructure acquisitions, or protecting client interests in federal and state regulatory proceedings, our team delivers experienced and cost-effective legal representation to every client.

Our team has served clients for decades on matters covering the landscape of energy infrastructure development, acquisition, financing, and regulation at the federal and state levels, as well as concerning critical litigation affecting the bottom line of our energy clients and their customers.

Our team represents client interests across many industries in litigation involving some of the largest and most complex environmental sites in the country and helps clients address issues impacting vital business transactions, including mergers and redevelopment projects.

As environmental and energy policies and considerations become increasingly interwoven, our team of Environment and Energy lawyers work to help clients make environmentally and economically wise choices and advise them on how current and proposed laws, regulations, and government policies could impact their businesses.

Environment & Energy Litigation

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Our clients often are confronted with seemingly intractable obstacles and conflicts. We help them navigate these challenges and, when necessary, strongly defend or pursue their interests in litigation to reach favorable outcomes.

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Environment & Energy Strategic Counseling

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Clients rely on our environment and energy team to anticipate and advise them on the strategic implications of their business and litigation decisions and emerging challenges. Our lawyers advise our clients from a strong understanding of each client, the client’s business, and the key issues that drive their businesses.

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Environment & Energy Transactions

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Clients rely on our ability to find practical solutions to help them complete transactions essential to their businesses. We are skilled negotiators who help clients implement deals, craft documents and reduce obstacles and risks that move initiatives and transactions forward.

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Environmental Insurance Coverage

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We understand how important legacy and long-tail environmental insurance is to addressing past liabilities that arise in present day, or how important current insurance may be to allocating future environmental risks, facilitating liability transfers, ensuring finite cleanup costs, protecting multiple parties and completing a deal, particularly when environmentally impacted properties are involved. Together with our insurance recovery team, we negotiate with insurers to obtain coverage for legacy liabilities, secure current day policy terms, and work with the key insurers, underwriters, brokers and consultants to coordinate and manage a client’s environmental exposure. We have the experience and resolve necessary to pursue insurance coverage through litigation. In many instances, working with our insurance recovery team, we have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement and judgments.

Negotiated and manuscripted pollution legal liability products on behalf of developers, corporations, and lenders.

Represents three chemical companies in responding to an unprecedented New Jersey directive for a statewide cleanup of newly emerging contaminants (PFAS). Also, defending these companies against claims for natural resource damages (NRD) and NRD assessments brought by five states (New Jersey, for PFAS and other alleged contaminants, and New Hampshire, Vermont, Ohio, and Michigan), and claims for damages by various water utilities in New Jersey, New York, and California. Also representing these clients in defense of a putative class action in federal court in Ohio, and defending them against multiple claims for alleged personal injury and medical monitoring in federal court in New Jersey.

Obtained partial summary judgment on liability, confirming a right to contribution under the New Jersey Sanitary Landfill Closure Act, and then won damages after a three-day trial for the former owner of land adjacent to the former Keegan Landfill in Kearny, New Jersey against the Town of Kearny. Affirmed on appeal, per curiam.

Serve as environmental counsel to one of the country’s largest grocery supply companies, advising the company on acquisition issues, material handling and transportation, insurance coverage, permitting, and other operational issues. Successfully resolved an enforcement matter in Massachusetts and disputes involving remediation of a warehouse facility in Connecticut.

Negotiated a favorable settlement for a medical device company and its parent companies concerning alleged liability and allocation issues at a Superfund site in New Jersey. We continue to negotiate matters related to a developer’s proposed productive reuse of the site within the parameters of a remedial design consent decree.

Serve as Special Gas Counsel to the Public Energy Authority of Kentucky (PEAK) since its inception in 1998. Negotiate municipal bond-financed, prepaid long-term natural gas supply purchases. Between 2018 and 2019, PEAK issued more than $2.2 billion in municipal bonds to prepay such purchase agreements. The client sells such gas to its members and more than two dozen municipalities at below market prices; their ratepayers will save millions in gas cost over the next 5-6 years

Represent a large international industrial engineering and manufacturing company in a response action involving the Portland Harbor Superfund Site in Oregon. Our role has included negotiating the remedial design of a portion of the environmental remedy and separate settlement negotiations with federal, state, and tribal natural resource damages trustees concerning potential responsibility for a share of the clean up costs of the site.

Serves as lead counsel for a leading medical device manufacturer in all aspects of the Berry’s Creek Study Area Superfund site in New Jersey, including the site remedial investigation, potential remedy screening, allocation process, and potential natural resource damages assessment process. We participate in the Potentially Responsible Parties Group’s leadership and management and are involved with policy planning and strategy for the group and for our client.

Served as gas counsel to The Southeast Alabama Gas Supply District concerning a 30-year natural gas prepayment transaction funded by our client’s issuance of $970 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds. The transaction produced substantial natural gas commodity price savings for municipal natural gas systems in Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Virginia and will save the natural gas consumer millions in the first six years.

Advised a wire and cable manufacturer on the environmental aspects of its purchase of businesses in Canada, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Ohio. Continues to advise the company on post-acquisition environmental remediation and compliance work.

Advise the Town of Greenwich, Connecticut on myriad environmental issues related to the historical use of town properties. Negotiated two Consent Decrees for the Town related to sewer issues and are handling complex remediation issues at Town properties. These matters involve complicated negotiations with federal, state and local regulators and sensitive communications with Town residents.

Obtained for this developer the federal Army Corps of Engineers, state water quality certification, and local inland wetlands permits for the approval of a lifestyle center, part of a 1.2-million-square-foot development on 240 acres of land owned by Evergreen Walk in the Town of South Windsor, Connecticut.