Members of Keller Rohrback’s environmental litigation team recently sat for an interview with a reporter from the legal reporting website, Lawdragon.com. Lynn Sarko, Yoona Park, Matt Preusch, and Dan Mensher went in-depth on the Keller Rohrback environmental litigation practice group’s past, present and future, including touching on several of the team’s recent newsworthy victories.

An excerpt from the story can be read below. The full story is available on Lawdragon.com here.

The environmental law attorneys at Keller Rohrback take their cases personally. When devastating fires swept across Oregon on Labor Day 2020, the smoke reached as far as partner Yoona Park’s office in Portland. “People here couldn't see outside their windows past, like, six feet, because it was just orange outside,” she recalls.

Partner Matthew Preusch is based in Santa Barbara, Calif., a few miles from where, in May 2015, an underground pipeline ruptured, spilling more than 140,000 gallons of crude oil onto beaches and properties along the Pacific Coast. “It happened 20 minutes from my house,” Preusch says. “It was the largest oil spill since 1969 in California. So it was obviously a huge impact for our community.”

Both Park and Preusch are part of the Keller Rohrback teams that have successfully represented victims of the Oregon fires and the Santa Barbara spill in litigation against Berkshire Hathaway-owned utility, PacifiCorp, and Texas midstream crude oil company, Plains All American Pipeline. In the firm’s Seattle office, Lynn Lincoln Sarko, the firm’s managing partner and leader of the Complex Litigation Group, and Daniel Mensher, a leader in the firm’s environmental practice, have helped establish liability against chemical giant Monsanto for manufacturing PCBs that polluted waterways in the Pacific Northwest.

“We live with the harm and we see the harm from these cases every single day,” says Park. “And so, I think it makes these cases so much more personal and meaningful to us, to know that these are the types of cases that we are expending all these hours and energy on.”

This personal connection, Mensher believes, makes it easier to relate to what clients are going through. “One of the things I'm super proud of about my work at KR is we never take our eyes off the ball about what these cases are about, in terms of who is suffering and who has been harmed,” he says.

Says Mensher, “We can bring that sort of empathy and compassionate ability to articulate what is happening to folks who have either lost their home in a fire that was caused by Berkshire Hathaway's decisions to neglect its obligations to the people in Oregon, or to the Plains Pipeline company that decided to maximize its profits and neglect its responsibilities to the people in California.”