Mar 03 2016

A Texas environmental law firm creates a new service, Agency Submittal Legal Review, to provide an affordable legal review process to reduce unnecessary costs and legal liabilities in agency submissions.

HOUSTON – March 3, 2016 – The AL Law Group created a legal environmental review system to reduce company costs and legal liabilities in agency submissions. The proprietary process termed Agency Submittal Legal Review Service (ASLER) addresses compliance, wording, and legal judgments that often must be made within the “grayness” of increasingly more complicated environmental law.  The AL Law Group reviews permit document submissions, deviation reports, agency letters, and all other forms of agency submissions that could create legal liability and cost to companies.

Embedded as part of the team with company environmental professionals and technical consultants, AL Law Group attorneys conduct the ASLER service by scrutinizing agency submissions that might unintentionally create legal liability or over-comply with environmental laws.  The affordable environmental review delivers benefits based on case law and legal opinions, as well as the legal firm’s more than 140 years of big law firm experience.

Due to complexity, ambiguity and the necessary interpretation of the morass of ever-changing environmental regulations, almost everyone operates in a legal “gray area”, according to Jed Anderson, principal partner at AL Law Group.  Finding clarity with a rule where a company can comfortably operate within the law often requires more than technical judgment.

“On one side, if you interpret a rule incorrectly, you are potentially paying millions of dollars in unnecessary over-compliance. On the other side, if you interpret a rule incorrectly, you are potentially subjecting yourself to civil and criminal enforcement,” said Anderson. “Our advice to clients, since their decisions can be legally challenged, is that it is advantageous for them to be able to say ‘I relied on the advice of legal counsel’.”

Environmental consultants and technical personnel often see technical problems that lawyers do not; and, lawyers often see legal problems that technical personnel do not.  Using both to review permit submissions and environmental management systems helps avoid subjecting a company and individuals to more legal liability and cost.

“Working with our technical partners inside and outside of companies, the AL Law Group has helped clients save hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Anderson. “One leading Texas environmental consultant testified, ‘An AL Law Group attorney helped me save my client over $500,000 in what otherwise would have been an unnecessary facility change.’”

Anderson added that case law and legal opinions impact permits and other agency submissions.  “With the AL Law Group’s experience and background as an environmental law firm, our knowledge of state and federal regulation, and our relationships with regulators and agency officials, we can help companies rectify non-beneficial environmental permit conditions before or even after permits are issued.  We can also quickly review other agency submissions to help protect companies’ legal and financial interest.

“AL Law Group helps save client’s money, reduce liability, and reinvest in more productive environmental protection efforts when it comes to non-productive over-compliance.  And we can do this while offering clients more legal protection than if they are making these legal decisions by themselves without legal review,” he said.

The Agency Submittal Legal Review Service (ASLER) is available on a low hourly-fee basis—as well as a flat fee basis for companies wanting a fixed-rate fee for the ability to call anytime.

As a dedicated environmental law firm, AL Law Group has developed several professional service processes to assist clients with commonly occurring legal situations. In addition to ASLER, AL Law created the unique Over-Compliance Environmental Legal Assessment Service (OCELA), an innovative tool to help companies improve environmental performance while reducing unnecessary costs and decreasing potential liabilities created through over-compliance.  AL Law’s OCELA service evaluates commonly occurring over-compliance situations the law firm has detected through years of legal practice with Fortune 100 and smaller companies alike. Some examples of commonly found over-compliance situations include unnecessary permit conditions; non-use of alternative compliance strategies; misinterpretation of rules, permit conditions and/or guidance documents; and over-monitoring of permit parameters.