Federal Court Victory Ends Seven-Year Court Battle Over Environmental Contamination Claims

Hodgson Russ successfully obtained a victory in federal court as our attorneys put an end to a seven-year lawsuit and extinguished the risk of our client paying millions in damages. The matter involved a facility owned and operated by our client, a manufacturer and over the course of decades of operation, our client's facility became heavily contaminated with chemical residues. Some of those residues migrated off site into the surrounding community. We represented this manufacturer in connection with an administrative order on consent entered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the State Department of Environmental Conservation under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). The plaintiffs, members of the surrounding community, sued the manufacturer in federal court under the citizen suit provisions of several federal statutes, claiming that our client was not complying with the requirements of various environmental statutes and that EPA was not effectively enforcing them. Our attorneys successfully defeated the plaintiffs’ claims in court. In the decision, our motion to disqualify the plaintiffs' expert was granted and for summary judgment. The case was dismissed entirely — freeing our client to focus on completing the corrective action program without judicial intervention and to remove a substantial liability reserve from its books. Subsequent efforts by the plaintiffs to revive the suit have also been defeated.