Environmental

Members of Wildman Harrold’s Environmental Practice have a long history in the complex and challenging area of environmental law, successfully representing business, industrial, and individual clients. Our practice benefits from the experience of attorneys with backgrounds in both science and law, and in working on behalf of government agencies, making the firm particularly effective in understanding the business, legal, and scientific issues and addressing those issues in the judicial and regulatory contexts.

The firm defends and counsels clients in a wide variety of environmental matters, including environmental aspects of corporate and real estate transactions. It has represented entities in numerous enforcement, permit, and other proceedings in federal and state courts and before regulatory agencies including the U.S. EPA and several state environmental agencies. Representative experience includes the following:

• We represented, from the trial court level to a successful conclusion before the U.S. Supreme Court, a steel pickling company in a citizen’s suit brought under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act. The plaintiff alleged that the company had failed to submit certain reports under the Act. We argued that the plaintiff did not have Article III standing to sue because the company had complied during the Act’s notice period. Reversing the Court of Appeals in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court agreed and found that the citizen plaintiff had no standing to sue because its injuries would not be redressed by a judgment requiring only the payment of penalties or attorney’s fees.
• We represented a municipality and park district in a citizen suit alleging that a trap range had violated the Clean Water and Resource Conservation and Recovery Acts by shooting lead into a body of water without a permit. The suit sought to shut the range down and force an extensive cleanup of the site. After achieving dismissal of the portion of the suit alleging hazardous waste violations, we assisted the range in applying for and obtaining the first National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit issued to a gun range. We then successfully settled the remainder of the suit, which allowed the range to re-open and resume shooting, without conducting any remediation. We also defeated a third-party challenge to the NPDES permit before the Illinois Pollution Control Board.
• In a private-party CERCLA cost recovery action, we represented a company that had operated a dye-making plant several decades ago and was faced with defending a multi-million dollar claim by itself. We were able to unearth evidence of other parties’ contributions to the contamination and successfully defeated a third-party motion to dismiss. Following the court’s ruling, we negotiated an allocation of remediation costs that had our client paying far less than originally envisioned.