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California Lawyers Association (CLA) Environmental Law Conference at Yosemite®
One of California’s Largest & Most Accomplished Benches
No state puts more law between a major project and its groundbreaking than California. CEQA and NEPA, the Coastal Act, the state and federal Endangered Species Acts, Porter-Cologne and the Clean Water Act, and a planning code that runs from the general plan to the last condition of approval. Each one is a place where a project can lose its schedule, and most of them are enforceable by anyone with a filing fee. Meyers Nave exists for the owners who have to get through all of it.
Statewide Relationships & Influence
Most of that law is administered by people, and we know them. Two of our attorneys have served since 2006 as co-managing editors and chapter authors of California Land Use Practice, the state’s most authoritative treatise on the subject, so the agencies applying these statutes are working from what we wrote. We are in front of the air districts, the resource agencies, the coastal staff, and the city planning departments every week, for the owners and for the agencies themselves, across Government & Public Policy, Transportation & Infrastructure, and Supply Chain & Logistics.
So we start earlier than the application. We find the agencies with jurisdiction, the neighbors with standing, and the groups that will object, and we sit with them while the project can still change shape. An objection raised at a hearing costs a year. The same objection raised in a room in March costs an afternoon. We build agreement on the core issues at the beginning, while it is still cheap.
And we build the record anyway. A high-profile project is a high-profile target, and the agreement that holds with four agencies will not always hold with the fifth party who has a filing fee. The record we assemble to persuade a regulator is the record that beats a challenger. One document, two jobs.
Both jobs take a bench. Meyers Nave fields one of the largest and most accomplished land use, environmental, and water law practices in California, at any firm size, and more than 30 attorneys and professionals work these matters as one group. We do not separate litigation from regulatory advice, so the lawyer who shepherds your EIR is one who defends EIRs in court, and the challenge, when it comes, is argued by people who know how the record was built because they built it. What that buys an owner is time and certainty, the two things California’s process is engineered to take. Objections answered before they become filings, an approval assembled for the courtroom before anyone reaches it, and one group accountable from the first planning memo to the California Supreme Court.
What We Do
- Air Quality – representing clients before the California Air Resources Board, air quality management districts, and airport land use commissions, and defending the air quality analyses that carry major approvals
- CEQA/NEPA – environmental review across the full project lifecycle, from project description through record certification, and the writs and appeals that follow
- Climate Change & Sustainability – greenhouse gas analysis, climate planning, and the agreements that move major projects through California’s decarbonization mandates
- Energy, Utilities & Renewables – environmental review and permitting for the transmission, generation, and storage projects rebuilding California’s grid, including more than 40 major grid projects since 2006
- Hazards & Remediation – contaminated site cleanup, cost recovery, and enforcement defense under CERCLA, RCRA, and California law, on both sides of the caption
- Land Entitlements – general and specific plans, zoning, development agreements, and the approvals that carry a project from concept to groundbreaking
- Wildlife & Natural Resources – endangered species compliance, habitat strategy, and the resource agency coordination that keeps projects moving
Who We Serve
Ports, airports, railroads, and utilities. The university systems planning decades of campus growth. Cities, counties, and the special districts that plan, water, and power the state. And the private owners building alongside them, from Class I railroads to the developers of master-planned communities. The practice is chaired by Amrit Kulkarni, who also chairs the firm’s Transportation & Infrastructure industry practice, a reflection of how deeply the two disciplines integrate on the projects we handle.
Industries We Serve
We help build California.
- Government & Public Policy – government entities’ own facilities, plans, and the approvals they must defend
- Real Estate & Housing – urban, mixed-use, and housing development from entitlement through approval defense
- Sports & Entertainment – stadiums, arenas, and entertainment districts through environmental review and challenge
- Supply Chain & Logistics – ports, rail gateways, and the freight corridors that move California’s goods
- Transportation & Infrastructure – transit extensions, airports, and highway programs from scoping through defense
- Water Resources – dams, reservoirs, treatment plants, and the permits that govern them
Why Meyers Nave
The owners who hire us tend to arrive with the same profile of project. The schedule is political, the opposition is organized, the record will be read by a judge, and the entitlement is the asset. And we are more cost-effective than any other land use and environmental counsel in California, larger or smaller. The reason is the model. We pair elite talent and the bench strength of the largest firms with the surgical precision and client service of a boutique, built over more than four decades for the most cost-conscious government, private, and non-profit clients in California. That’s why we are the go-to firm when the stakes are high, the path isn’t clear, or the project just has to happen.
Approving comes before building, and the same project keeps moving after the record is certified, into delivery contracts, procurement, and the claims that follow groundbreaking. We follow it there; that part of the story lives at Construction.
