Beveridge & Diamond excels at providing comprehensive, business-focused advice on environmental and social responsibility mandates affecting international business, market access for products, and global supply chains.
Why B&D?
As companies pursue global trade and investment opportunities, we help them identify, understand, and comply with the expanding body of international, national, and sub-national environmental law. Our lawyers work with clients in diverse industry sectors to resolve critical environmental, health, and safety (EHS) and natural resource challenges related to their facilities and products around the world.
Focus
Our global practice covers both facility- and product-related aspects of environmental law.
On the product side, we support the entire product life-cycle, from design through distribution and market access, to end-of-life management. We help companies anticipate and comply with diverse country extended producer responsibility laws to ensure that products reach vital markets while reducing enforcement and business disruption risks. Our product work includes environmental and social responsibility issues such as responsible sourcing of raw materials and supply chain management.
On the facility side, we advise clients on transactions, including due diligence, permit transfers, and post-transaction compliance. We also work with client and local counsel teams to support a wide variety of “brick and mortar” EHS issues, including permit preparation and submission, regulatory compliance and facility audits, contaminated properties and remediation, inspection response and enforcement defense, and litigation strategy.
We also represent U.S. industry trade associations and individual clients in important international forums that drive the development of national environmental legislation and standards worldwide, including the Basel Convention, Stockholm Convention, and SAICM meetings. This work often provides an early warning of new regulatory trends, allows us to work with clients to shape initiatives at the global level, and provides unique access to key regulatory decision-makers in many regions.
While our practice is global, we maintain a particular focus on Latin America and Asia-Pacific, where our close working relationships with leading in-country environmental counsel and consulting firms enhance our direct practice expertise.
Worldwide Network of Expertise
We package “know-how” and “know-who” to provide deep bench strength for managing international environmental projects. Multinational businesses benefit from an international network of trusted local environmental counsel, consultants, and regulators that we have cultivated, and our involvement in multilateral treaty negotiations, which ensure clarity and efficiency for our clients across a plurality of jurisdictions. In many jurisdictions, we have years or decades-long relationships. At the same time, we are not tied to any specific firm or expert and are free to recommend the most appropriate talent for the project or to collaborate with a client’s existing service providers.
More importantly, we do not just hand off projects to local counsel. We provide oversight of local counsel’s work and vet their finished product, so our clients receive timely, practical, actionable, and cost-effective advice. Our work often includes issues simultaneously arising in multiple jurisdictions, such as for product compliance, recalls, and transactions.
Integrated Sustainability Leadership
As multinational corporations increasingly place value on corporate social responsibility, we support and enhance clients' business objectives through operational solutions and strategic leadership, including auditing facilities and supply chains to help our clients implement their commitments to the circular economy.
Representative Matters
Our international environmental law experience includes:
- Representing a manufacturer and distributor of chemical products in managing a multi-year global compliance audit with chemical regulatory requirements in more than 25 jurisdictions, in every region of the world, covering chemical ingredients, formulated chemical products, and industrial biocides.
- Advising companies in the electronics, consumer products and pharmaceutical sectors on new due diligence and supply chain communication tools for conflict minerals.
- Developing regional and global product take-back and recycling programs for used electronics, consumer and industrial batteries and other recyclable materials.
- Representing the U.S. electronics industry in negotiations under the Basel Convention on the scope of used and end-of-life electrical and electronic equipment classified as “hazardous waste” for purposes of international trade, which involved helping the sector develop and execute a multi-year advocacy strategy that resulted in the parties adopting new technical guidelines to confirm shipments of used equipment destined for repair and refurbishment satisfy the criteria for proper handling and documentation.
- Representing the global semiconductor industry in advocacy to successfully obtain an exemption from the ban of PFOS use in the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.
- Counseling manufacturers on the applicability of Latin American toy safety regulations and certification requirements to products intended for use by children.
