Environmental Litigation

MHN has a rich history of litigating environmental conflicts. When a defense contractor was sued by a multinational aluminum manufacturer for allegedly polluting the water supply of 1,100 residents of Wharton County, Texas, MHN was hired to rescue the company from alleged wrong doing of over thirty years ago. Employing experts in disciplines such as hydrogeology and water quality, groundwater modeling from isotopic data, environmental engineering, ground water remediation and using the skills of environmental historians to reconstruct the appropriate standard of care, MHN attorneys have taken the complex and reduced it to simple concepts that can be persuasively taught to jurors called upon to decide, for example, the dimensions of a contamination plume and whether the transport mechanisms for certain contaminants such as trichloroethylene (TCE) were sufficient to tie the actions of the business owner to the problems suffered by residents, or rather, were the more recent actions of the multinational aluminum manufacturer the cause of the problems.

MHN is well-schooled in the federal statutory provisions of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) and similar legislation and are participating in the defense of a federal action in Victoria, Texas related to groundwater contamination. We have served as counsel in litigation related to dumpsites in Calcasieu Parish in Louisiana involving Browning Ferris Industries, leaching of pollution into water supplies relative to dumpsites in Texas and Ohio involving Cooper Industries and pollution related claims in northeast Texas involving Lone Star Steel, among others.

Additionally our firm has attorneys who have devoted the lion’s share of their practice to the field of toxic tort, including asbestosis and silicosis. As such, our firm has developed expertise in prosecuting and defending clients in a mass tort environment in industry-wide litigation.

We have distinguished ourselves as a firm capable of distilling the relevant and important evidence from regulatory documentation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) as well as scientific documentation found in and behind groundwater characterization reports, etc. By skillfully engaging in documentary archeology, we have been able to find evidence where few believed it still existed. We have been able to penetrate the veil created by enrollment in Voluntary Cleanup Programs (VCPs) and get to the heart of issues cleverly hidden by sophisticated polluters. Whether on behalf of businesses or individuals, MHN can assist in all facets of environmental disputes.