Environmental Litigation Support

When was the contamination released?
Is it coming from a neighboring site?
Did we contribute to the problem?

There can be huge sums of money riding on the answers to these questions. In the increasingly complex arena of environmental litigation, the need to synthesize and communicate technical concepts and opinions has never been greater. Lawyers and potentially responsible parties need experts with a combination of qualifications, experience, knowledge, and great communications skills.

Experts in technical fields must bridge the gap between law and science. Like a great professor, they must be able to communicate complex technical information to an audience of laypeople. We have earned a reputation for clear communication using thorough data analysis and compelling technical illustrations. LEA experts have advanced degrees in science and engineering and an average of 25+ years of experience in environmental practice. We employ an array of environmental forensic methods to dig deeper and help solve clients’ toughest problems.

Environmental Forensics

Typical environmental investigations measure only a fraction of the chemical, physical and geological information really contained at a contaminated site. Environmental forensics unveils this hidden data to answer questions such as: when did the contamination occur? How did the contamination occur? Where did the contamination come from?

“The present is the key to the past”

James Hutton, one of the pioneers of geology, wrote these words over 200 years ago to describe the use of evidence available today, like fossils and sedimentary structures in rocks, to understand the environment millions of years ago when those rocks were being formed. Hutton’s wisdom is equally valid as a description of the emerging field of environmental forensics. After all, forensic science is the reconstruction of past events based on trace evidence that remains at the scene.

The need for an environmental forensics investigation is usually triggered by a discrete event such as toxic tort, or natural resource damages litigation, or the desire to allocate cleanup costs among multiple parties. Increasingly, environmental forensics techniques are also being applied to conventional projects (i.e. projects in which there are no formal disputes) due to the power of these techniques to provide insight into subsurface conditions, which ultimately leads to better decision-making and more efficient, less-costly remediation.

Environmental forensic methods can be divided into at least five categories:

Chemical fingerprinting
Stable isotope analysis
Environmental tracers
Data visualization, data mining and geostatistics
Dendroecology