Environmental & Land Use Litigation

Overview

When preventive measures are not enough, our Environmental & Land Use Litigation team mounts vigorous defenses on behalf of clients who face complex challenges in courts and in administrative proceedings. Deeply experienced, we have achieved significant victories for a diverse group of clients involved in a broad range of environmental and land use disputes.

We support colleagues in our Environmental, Energy & Land Use practice group by helping our clients minimize potential exposure to environmental liabilities by anticipating, identifying and managing risk – and by applying best practices in complying with increasingly stringent environmental rules and regulations.

Members of this team of “very thorough and well prepared” (Chambers and Partners Latin America 2016) litigators work with clients to strategically resolve their environmental and land use disputes.  Our clients benefit from our responsive, up-to-the-minute advice on relevant statutory, regulatory, and case law developments that can help them avoid enforcement actions from environmental agencies, multi-party claims and other litigation in a rapidly changing field.

What We Do

The McConnell Valdés Environmental & Land Use Litigation team:

• Aggressively defends clients against regulatory enforcement actions, multi-party claims, and other litigation matters before state and federal courts and governmental regulatory agencies.
• Provides comprehensive counseling on environmental and land use regulatory compliance.

Representative Clients & Matters

• Acted as lead defense attorneys in a of a conglomerate various pharmaceutical companies in Puerto Rico in a class action stemming from alleged toxic emissions from an industrial wastewater treatment plant to where these companies and others discharge.

• Co-chaired the plaintiffs’ steering committee in a high-profile and complex litigation stemming from a gas explosion that killed 33 people and settled for over $100 million.

• Representation of a major gasoline distributor as a licensee of Shell products in Puerto Rico, in a multi-million dollar, multi-district litigation pending before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, were the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, as well as many other governmental and water treatment entities throughout the United States, are seeking relief from defendants' alleged contamination or threatened contamination, of groundwater with the gasoline additive methyl ethyl tertiary butyl ether.

News & Publications