Natural Resources

Our attorneys have developed significant experience in the area of Natural Resources Damage (“NRD”) litigation that not only includes issues associated with the calculation and quantification of such damages, but the negotiation of innovative settlements and procedural negotiations with the trustee agencies. Our lawyers have negotiated precedential settlements with trustees, including an innovative and precedential interpretation of state NRD grants of authority leading to the actual delegation of natural resource regulatory authority from the government to another entity that had been deeded property from the state.

Our in-depth work in the area of NRD damage quantification on behalf of our clients has also allowed our attorneys to develop a very significant base of knowledge in quantification of sediment, fish, and avian impacts, in particular. Our Firm has spent years collaborating with the country’s foremost scientific natural resource experts to develop comprehensive evaluations of surface water and sediments, groundwater soils, terrestrial and wetland plant communities, aquatic biota, wildlife, and species of special significance.

Aggressive and innovative strategies employed by our team of lawyers and their experts to identify and quantify impacts to resources have included caged-fish bioaccumulation studies, bioassay testing (benthic community and fish tissue), bird and wildlife receptor studies, avian toxicological screens, effects range impact evaluations, fate and transport modeling (including colloidal transport of pesticides), uptake and egg-shell thinning impacts, modeling of chemical degradation and attenuation, and fingerprinting and chemical-dating procedures to link impacts to a particular source.  We have also coordinated work in evaluating migratory flyways, rookeries, primary habitat area studies and the evaluation of spatial and temporal distribution of persistent chemicals to those areas and resources.

Simultaneously with case development of identification and quantification of impacts, BW attorneys have experience in linking the historical releases to the resource impacts by evaluation of selected indicator chemicals and their environmental distribution, mass balance analysis of historical production processes and feed materials, and reconstruction of relevant plant processes in order to fingerprint plant processes, constituents or markers to the particular operation of various sources.  BW attorneys have worked with experts to coordinate discovery and evidentiary matters to allow for the development of definitive process models of manufacturers of interest.