Environmental
Lawsuits—Big Business
After
16-months of investigating the environmental movement's key players, the
normally left-leaning newspaper the San
Diego Bee's environmental reporter Tom Knudson examines the
high-powered fund raising, litigation and public relations machine that
has come to characterize the environmental movement. Using the Freedom
of Information Act, Knudson discovered that so called non-profit
environmental organizations and the law firms that represent them are
turning environmental litigation into big business. Knudson's findings
include the following:
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During
the 1990s, the government paid out $31.6 million in attorney fees
for 434 environmental cases brought against federal agencies. The
average award per case was more than $70,000. One long-running
lawsuit in Texas involving an endangered salamander netted lawyers
for the Sierra Club and other plaintiffs more than $3.5 million in
taxpayer funds.
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Attorneys
for environmental groups are not shy about asking for money. They
earn $150 to $350 an hour, and sometimes they get accused of trying
to gouge the government. In 1993, three judges on the U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals in Washington were so appalled by one Sierra Club
Legal Defense Fund lawyer's "flagrant over-billing" that
they reduced her award to zero. "Even a perfunctory examination
of (the lawyer's) time entries would show that she billed on a
Brobdingnabian scale," wrote the judges, referring to the
giants in "Gulliver's Travels" to drive their point home.
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Lawyers
for industry and natural resource users get paid for winning
environmental cases, too. When California water districts won a
follow-up suit over the "splittail" last year, their law
firms submitted a bill for $546,403.70 to the government. The
Justice Department was stunned.
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"Plaintiffs
have failed to exercise any billing discretion," wrote U.S.
Attorney Matthew Love in a January brief. "They seek
compensation for excessive, duplicative and redundant tasks ...
charge their normal hourly rates for (routine) activities such as
telephone calls, letter writing (and) review of files."
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Since
1995, most cases brought have not been about dams, nuclear power or
pesticides, but about rare and endangered species. That flood of
suits has turned judges into modern day Noahs who decide which
species are saved -- and which aren't. But the judges -- guided by
law, not science -- aren't always the best-equipped to make
biologically correct decisions.
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Suing
on behalf of species is a specialty niche. Four law firms filed more
than half of all such suits from 1995 to 2000. A whopping 75 percent
of those cases were lodged in six states: California, Arizona,
Oregon, New Mexico, Texas and Colorado. One kind of case -- over
"critical habitat" -- has so swamped the Fish and Wildlife
Service that it has halted the biological evaluations necessary to
add new species to the federal endangered species list.
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