Legal Legacies: How Firms Fuel Generations of Harm
The legal industry’s role in the climate crisis demands more attention. Take Latham & Watkins, a Vault 100 firm who has ranked as an F firm on the Law Students for Climate Accountability Scorecard for the past three years. Equipped with some of the best resources in the legal industry (including top training, talent, and funding), the firm’s “success” story is one that has come at the expense of the health and wellbeing of communities it has had a hand in polluting. Latham & Watkins was the second worst firm in transactional work for the fossil fuel industry between 2017 and 2021, with $140,153,000,000 transacted on behalf of the industry, and third worst in litigation work for the fossil fuel industry, litigating 21 cases exacerbating climate change in the 2022 Scorecard.
On September 7th 2021, Latham & Watkins, representing Chevron, brought a challenge to a local agency rule that would require the oil behemoth to reduce pollution from one of the highest polluting pieces of its refinery in Richmond, California. This is not the first time Latham & Watkins has had a hand in perpetuating climate harms in Richmond—a city that has been subject to decades of environmental injustice at the hands of fossil fuel companies and their Big Law accomplices. In 2010, Latham & Watkins represented ConocoPhillips in Communities for a Better Environment v. South Coast Air Quality Management District, seeking to help the petroleum company evade a rigorous environmental impact review. In facilitating the advancement of fossil fuel projects in an already overburdened community, Latham & Watkins has left a dangerous legacy for the people of Richmond—a legacy of respiratory illness, polluted air and waters, and fossil fuel dependence.
This is only one of many stories that remains unexamined in the legal industry. Indeed, law firms escape accountability for their actions, in part, by taking on discrete cases and distinct clients. Most members of the public are familiar with the environmental harms that Chevron creates, but the law firms that keep the oil giant running use the lawyer-client relationship, and the perception of neutrality that comes with it, to distance themselves from Chevron’s actions. However, the harms that each of these individual legal actions inflicts should not be kept siloed. Harm accumulates in bodies, environments, and communities, a throughline of violence connecting discrete legal actions across time, clients, and generations. Each time a law firm represents a fossil fuel client or takes on a new case, it perpetuates an ongoing cycle of systemic injustice, disproportionately shouldered by marginalized communities and communities of color. We believe that law firm climate accountability must extend beyond transactions, litigation, and lobbying—areas of Big Law and fossil fuel entanglement already documented in our annual Scorecards—to the concrete harms suffered by frontline communities who are forced to live out the legacies of corporate complicity.
Through Legal Legacies: How Firms Fuel Generations of Harm, we will investigate and share stories that center the realities of frontline communities—including their movements to build power and bring about change—while drawing linkages across different legal actions to reveal geographies of injustice, built and maintained by law firms over time. Each story will focus on a different region of the country. While the climate crisis pervades our global reality, communities deprived of Environmental Justice have borne the brunt of ongoing pollution—which recognizes no borders—for decades, creating an imperative for a regional, and yet still place-specific, response. These regions suffer the cumulative impacts of unfettered corporate greed, while lawyers at firms across the country and internationally escape the worst effects of their exacerbation of the climate crisis.
The purpose of this project is threefold: (1) to expand the conversation of law firm accountability beyond the LSCA Scorecard by providing narrative data irreducible to numbers; (2) to mobilize the power of storytelling in support of community efforts to organize against environmental injustice; and (3) to expose the lived consequences of law firms’ fossil fuel-enabling work.
Check back soon for the first story of this series, and sign up for our newsletter to stay updated! We encourage law students to connect with us to dig into these histories of harms, and communities and organizers to be in touch with us to uplift your stories, struggles, and successes. We stand in solidarity with the broader environmental justice movement as we fight to build a livable future. Reach out to us at info@ls4ca.org if you would like to join us in changing these legacies.
