Our client was a principal of an environmental consulting firm. As sometimes happens, one of the firm’s former clients, a real estate developer, brought a civil suit claiming that the firm’s environmental certifications of a building site were incorrect. During that litigation, the firm’s adversary told law enforcement authorities that our client had personally and knowingly submitted falsified soil test data to government authorities. During the ensuing federal criminal investigation, the government interrogated the employee who actually sent the falsified data. The employee denied sending the data to the test laboratory and, by implication, incriminated our client. Through a detailed analysis of the company’s records, we were able to prove to the prosecutor that the employee-witness had falsely denied sending the bogus test data to the laboratory and that he was solely responsible for the falsification. The prosecutor decided not to prosecute our client.

In another environmental case, we were retained by a large maritime shipping line to represent the chief engineer of one of its ships. Multi-national treaties and federal anti-pollution laws require ships to make entries in an Oil Record Book certifying that the amount of oil contained in the water that is discharged from the bilge of the ship is less than a certain number of parts per million. The Oil Record Book is subject to Coast Guard inspection. Knowingly making false entries in the logbook violates several federal criminal laws. In our case, new owners of the shipping line disclosed to the Coast Guard and the Justice Department that, during a previous owners’ tenure, the automatic controls on the ship’s discharge system that were supposed to prevent the discharge of excessively oily water had been altered at certain times, thereby making certain Oil Record Book entries questionable. We investigated on behalf of our client, and determined that the automatic controls that were approved by the Coast Guard were not triggered by the discharge of oil, and that the system did not actually detect or measure the presence of oil in the bilge water. Rather, the system only measured the opacity of the discharge. This meant that the government could not prove that knowingly false entries were made in the Oil Record Book. No prosecution of any individuals resulted from the federal investigation.