The Mintz Group has extensive fact-gathering experience in environmental litigation.

We are routinely successful at finding evidence about the history of particular sites: who owned them, who did business on them, who dumped on them, etc. With Superfund sites, we know how to dig deeper than the government does for Potentially Responsible Parties.

Some of our environmental investigations have been parallel to criminal investigations, both pre- and post-indictment.

Following are examples of how we conduct our environmental investigations (some details in these case studies have been changed to protect client confidentiality):

Digging Deep
We have built up substantial expertise in how and where public and private information is maintained historically. Several of our environmental investigations have uncovered valuable nuggets in corporate archives and courthouses from as long ago as the 1920s and 1930s.

But it is when the paper trail leads us to people that we think we add the most value. We hire and train our investigators for the ability to knock on someone's door and leave hours later with the relevant details, whether that witness is a retired truckdriver or a CEO.

Who Else Dumped There?
In one case, we worked for counsel to a consumer-products company that trucked manufacturing waste to a landfill near its headquarters for forty years, and then faced threats from local environmental officials that it would have to bear the entire cost of cleaning up the site.

Other local companies were denying responsibility for the site, though the client had heard that they had dumped toxic waste there too. We succeeded at our assignment to identify and interview former employees of these other companies who could remember how, decades earlier, they had disposed of toxic waste. They helped us show historical streams of hazardous waste that went into company dumpsters and from those dumpsters into the relevant landfill.

Who Owned It?
A dispute over who should bear the cost of cleaning up a polluted plot of land turned in part on who had owned and operated it during the early part of the twentieth century. Working for the attorney for one of the former owners, we looked for deeds, mortgages, building permits, even records of the local animal-control agency.

None of these helped resolve the dispute. But then we found a separate, detailed record book kept by an obscure local government agency. It showed that our client was not the operator at the relevant time—which was just the kind of evidence we sought.