• videocam On-Demand Webinar
  • signal_cellular_alt Intermediate
  • card_travel Environmental
  • schedule 90 minutes

Identifying, Quantifying, Contractually Allocating, and Insuring Against Environmental Liabilities and Obligations: Environmental 101 for Transactional Lawyers

About the Course

Introduction

This CLE course will review both traditional and evolving environmental insurance products (e.g., pollution legal liability, cost cap, and excess of indemnity), escrows, contractual liability transfers, and other tools in the context of the cleanup and/or transfer of contaminated properties.

Description

Counsel for all stakeholders with interest in contaminated properties: real estate, environmental, and bankruptcy counsel serving industrial clients, governments, Brownfield developers, remediation contractors, and PRP groups can benefit from quantifying and even reducing cleanup costs in a manner that is accurate, efficient, and will hold over time.

Contaminated properties present multiple financial risks: (1) costs for unknown pollutants and otherwise unanticipated remediation; (2) cost overruns for expected remediation; and (3) toxic tort and other private, third-party claims. For 20 years, parties relied on pollution legal liability insurance and, until 2011, on "cost cap" insurance to address these risks.

When traditional insurers stopped offering cost cap insurance in 2011, the environmental risk transfer industry developed alternative cost cap structures, as well as excess of indemnity insurance. Escrows, captives, trusts, annuities, and letters of credit work in conjunction with insurance to collateralize risk.

Listen as our panel composed of attorneys and insurance representatives discusses these tools as they have arisen and evolved over the last 20 years.

Presented By

Lawrence P. Schnapf
Principal
Schnapf LLC

Mr. Schnapf is an environmental attorney based in New York City and New Jersey with over 40 years of national environmental transactional experience and is the principal of Schnapf LLC. With this background and his geology training, he is uniquely qualified to handle the legal and technical issues commonly encountered with environmental issues. Mr. Schnapf primarily concentrates on environmental risks associated with corporate, real estate and brownfield transactions; commercial financing including asset-based lending, syndicated loans, mezzanine loans and distressed debt; bankruptcy, workouts and corporate restructuring. He has extensive experience with brownfield redevelopment and financing, including representing affordable housing developers and assisting local development corporations or not-for-profit organizations with their brownfield planning programs. Mr. Schnapf also counsels clients on environmental, represents clients in federal and state environmental litigation, enforcement actions, administrative proceedings and private cost recovery actions. He has also served as liaison counsel for PRP steering committees.

William J. Squires
Member
Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky & Popeo PC

Mr. Squires counsels corporations, developers, manufacturers, private equity firms, lenders, and individuals in litigation, transactional, and regulatory settings. He represents clients in disputes under state and federal law pertaining to releases of oil and hazardous materials — including PFAS and other emerging contaminants — and works closely with environmental consultants, Massachusetts licensed site professionals, engineers, risk assessors, geologists, and other experts in responding to such releases. Mr. Squires represents clients in state and federal courts and regularly appears before regulatory agencies and municipal boards.

Credit Information
  • This 90-minute webinar is eligible in most states for 1.5 CLE credits.


  • Live Online


    On Demand

Date + Time

  • event

    Thursday, July 20, 2023

  • schedule

    1:00 p.m. ET./10:00 a.m. PT

  1. Use of environmental insurance and other risk transfer tools to support fixed-price cleanups and purchases/sales of contaminated properties
    1. Why use
    2. When to use
    3. How to use
    4. Advantages and disadvantages
  2. Mechanics of tools
  3. Lessons learned

The panel will review these and other key issues:

  • How can costs be best quantified and fixed?
  • How can costs be best reduced?
  • How can cleanup quality be best improved?
  • What are the opportunities (and best means) of negotiating and scripting favorable language in policies, escrows, and other risk management tools?
  • What are the challenges and pitfalls of using the various tools?