Environmental Enforcement & Regulatory Counseling

We represent clients before Congress, state legislatures, and environmental and natural resources agencies. Team members have decades of experience and deep contacts with regulatory agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Justice, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, among others.

The team comprises administrative and courtroom litigators working together, as needed, with the firm’s environmental litigators for civil enforcement matters and white collar litigators for criminal matters, as well as regulatory compliance counselors and seasoned transactional practitioners. McGuireWoods defends environmental enforcement proceedings and counsels clients on environmental compliance, advises on development of contaminated property, closes deals and participates in the administrative process. Lawyers also coordinate with colleagues from lobbying and public affairs subsidiary McGuireWoods Consulting to facilitate greater access to decision-makers in legislative bodies and administrative agencies.

How We Help

Clients turn to McGuireWoods for guidance on environmental law matters through counseling, negotiations, enforcement and litigation. We assist clients with permitting new projects, complying with complicated and evolving technical regulatory requirements, auditing and environmental management systems for operating facilities, and defending state and federal enforcement matters and citizen suits. The team counsels clients from the investigative stage to resolution, whether by settlement or vigorous defense in litigation. Lawyers advise companies on matters involving remediation and site closure, the rulemaking process and related litigation, crisis management, and support and due diligence for commercial, energy and real estate transactions.

We apply complicated environmental law principles in the context of challenging technical and engineering concepts, and draw on lawyers’ technical backgrounds to find practical solutions to environmental problems and explain difficult concepts to clients in easy-to-understand terms. The team helps facilities maximize flexibility while meeting legal requirements, thereby protecting business interests and the environment at the same time.

Our strengths include:

• enforcement, including information collection requests, defense and resolution, litigation;
• air (Clean Air Act and state analogs);
• climate change;
• water (Clean Water Act and state analogs, Safe Drinking Water Act);
• natural resources (Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act);
• waste (Resource Conservation and Recovery Act)
• Superfund and brownfields, Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act;
• toxics (Toxic Substances Control Act);
• emergency response, process safety management (OSHA) and risk management plan program (CAA);
• environmental justice;
• emerging contaminants (e.g., EtO, PFAS);
• permitting and defense of permit challenges;
• rulemaking comments and related litigation;
• due diligence and support for transactions;

Representative Experience

• Coalition of more than 20 of the largest investor-owned utilities in the United States and the National Trade Association for Public Power in D.C. Circuit and Supreme Court litigation involving EPA’s attempt to regulate carbon emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act;
• Fortune 20 company as national PFAS counsel providing strategic advice to reduce liability risks related to PFAS;
• Commercial shrimpers at Fourth Circuit in a bet-the-industry appeal concerning CWA challenge to their operations;
• Largest developers in the Southeast U.S. on redevelopment of contaminated property across the Sunbelt;
• Electric power providers in obtaining and defending air permits for new and expanded natural gas-fired power plants;
• Companies in the electric utility, cement, oil and gas, solid waste, and manufacturing sectors in responding to information collection requests under Section 114 of the CAA and Section 308 of the CWA and defending civil enforcement actions and citizen suits alleging CAA, CWA and RCRA violations;
• Large municipal government in defense of a pending civil enforcement action by the EPA, a state agency and a local environmental group alleging CWA violations regarding its wastewater system (sanitary sewer overflows) and its municipal separate storm sewer system;
• Brownfields redeveloper in acquiring and cleaning a former paper manufacturing plant ready to be proposed for inclusion on the federal National Priorities List;
• National and regional solid waste companies regarding the construction and operation of landfills and transfer facilities for municipal and other solid wastes, as well as the disposal or other management of particular categories of wastes, including construction and demolition debris, asbestos, electronics and medical waste;
• Developer of a new natural gas pipeline on environmental permitting matters;
• Fortune 200 company on management of legal risk arising from PFAS detections associated with historic site operations; and
• Oil and gas company in a contested hearing associated with the state of New Mexico’s rulemaking for a visibility plan under the CAA.

Download a copy of our team brochure.