David K. Brown
David K. Brown focuses his practice on environmental regulatory compliance counseling, enforcement defense, and litigation involving air quality, water quality, hazardous substances, and climate change. He advises corporate and municipal clients in the assessment of complex regulatory requirements, threatened enforcement actions, permitting and appeals, due diligence reviews, and reporting and warning requirements arising under federal and state environmental laws.
David has advised clients on such environmental laws as the Clean Air Act (CAA), the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), as well as state environmental statutes and implementing regulations. He also advises clients regarding appropriate and effective responses to government mandates aimed at limiting climate-changing emissions from all sectors, ranging from energy to chemicals to transportation to manufacturing to agriculture.
David has been at the forefront of some of the most prominent environmental litigation and regulatory investigations and enforcement actions in the country, including those related to the Aliso Canyon natural gas leak and the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility fuel releases and underground storage tank closure process. David also counsels clients concerning emerging regulatory enforcement priorities, such as business operations associated with the sale of products that have the potential to impact air emissions.
He is well versed in developing strategies for responding to and interacting with federal, state, and local regulators, including working with technical experts on complex environmental and regulatory issues such as remediation of contaminated sites, groundwater modeling, contaminant fate and transport, vapor intrusion, emissions quantification, toxicological studies, failure analysis, risk assessments, and natural resource valuation.
With experience at several Superfund sites, David has represented companies in disputes with regulators regarding remedy implementation, multiparty litigations to address cleanup liability, and cost-allocation mediation processes. David also has experience assisting clients with seeking legislative changes to existing environmental laws and commenting on proposed environmental regulations.
