Work Product Protection for Draft Expert Reports and Communications With Experts
Here’s a head’s up for environmental litigators. The committee of judges and lawyers who decide on amendments to the federal rules of civil procedure have agreed to change Rule 26 to protected draft expert reports and attorney-expert communications from discovery.
New Rule 26(a)(2)(B) still has several months of review time that have to pass before it becomes official. However, assuming that the Supreme Court and the Congress do not object (and typically they don’t), the new rule will go into effect December 1, 2010.
Under FRCP 26(b)(3)(A) and (B), discovery is not available for documents “and tangible things” prepared in anticipation of litigation or for trial absent a showing by the requesting party of substantial need for the information to prepare its case and undue hardship to obtain “their substantial equivalent by other means.” Rules 26(b)(4)(B) and (C) have been added to extend this work product protection to draft expert reports and, with three exceptions, to communications between counsel and expert witnesses.
The first exception is a communication between counsel and the expert that “relate to compensation for the expert's study or testimony.”
If you are wondering whether discovery still reaches a communication in which a lawyer provides facts to the expert, the answer is yes. Under the second exception, discovery is permitted of communications that “identify facts or data that the party's attorney provided and that the expert considered in forming the opinions to be expressed.”
Finally, to address the source of assumptions relied upon by an expert, the third exception allows a party to discover communications between an opposing counsel and expert that “identify assumptions that the party's attorney provided and that the expert relied upon in forming the opinions to be expressed.”
Inadvertent production can occur and work product protections are not absolute. So prudent lawyers will still want to consider a F.R.Evid. 502(d) order (protecting from a waiver claim inadvertently produced privileged or protected information). But the days of avoidance of draft reports, using consulting experts to do draft reports, and avoiding communications with experts on non-factual issues, in federal court, at least, will soon be over.
EPA Issues a New Policy on Superfund Negotiations: Time For Another Rant?
Late last week, Elliott Gilberg, Acting Director of EPA’s Office of Site Remediation Enforcement (OSRE) issued an Interim Policy on Managing the Duration of Remedial Design/Remedial Action Negotiations. Members of the regulated community may not be surprised by the contents of the memo, but they certainly will not be pleased. In brief, the memorandum fundamentally makes two points:
EPA wants to shorten the duration of RD/RA negotiation
EPA is going to use the heavy hammer of unilateral administrative orders, or UAOs, to keep PRPs’ feet to the fire and ensure that negotiations move quickly.
PRPs will likely agree that shortening the duration of negotiations would be a good outcome in the abstract – but achieving it by greater use of UAOs? I don’t think so.
I can only wonder if EPA has even considered the impact of the Burlington Northern decision here. Is this a perverse reaction from EPA? A metaphorical throwing down the gauntlet to PRPs? It certainly feels that way.
I have a different suggestion, if EPA truly wants to shorten negotiations. First, acknowledge Burlington Northern and compromise on the merits in those great majority of cases where there are legitimate divisibility arguments. Second, stop acting like the last bastion of command and control regulation. Set cleanup standards and then, to the maximum extent permitted by existing law, let PRPs clean up to those standards, without micromanaging every detail of the cleanup process.
Stormwater Discharges From Construction Activity: What Next From EPA?
Construction and development companies praying for an economic recovery next year have something else to worry about: pending new EPA regulations regarding stormwater discharges from construction activities – and claims from environmental groups that EPA’s proposal isn’t stringent enough.
EPA issued a proposal on November 28, 2008. That proposal is complex, but the aspect of it that has received the most attention is the requirement that certain construction sites greater than 30 acres meet numerical turbidity limits (specifically, 13 nephelometric turbidity units (NTUs), which I had to include in this post just because it sounds so cool). Developers have opposed the numeric limits; the National Association of Home Builders estimates that the cost to comply would be $15,000 to $45,000 per acre.
On the other hand, the NRDC and Waterkeeper Alliance have threatened to sue EPA if EPA does not revise the propose rule to include post-construction controls as part of the rule. EPA has stated that it is not planning to do so. It’s not obvious that NRDC and Waterkeeper Alliance have the better of this specific debate, but the argument regarding post-construction controls is similar to the ongoing discussion in Massachusetts and elsewhere regarding the need for ongoing stormwater controls at properties other than industrial facilities that are already regulated.
The issue is not going to go away. EPA is under a deadline to issue the rule by December 1, 2009.
A Rant Against Superfund
As some of my clients know all too well, I’ve been spending a lot of time on some Superfund matters recently. Although I can’t remember a period when I didn’t have at least one moderately active Superfund case, significant immersion in complex remedial decision-making and negotiations provides an unwelcome reminder just how flawed CERCLA is. Almost 20 years after the acid rain provisions of the Clean Air Act ushered in wide-spread acceptance of the use of market mechanisms to achieve environmental protection goals and the state of Massachusetts successfully privatized its state Superfund program, the federal Superfund program, like some obscure former Russian republic which remains devoted to Stalinism, is one of the last bastions of pure command and control regulation.
Can anyone tell me why the remedy selection process takes years and costs millions of dollars – before any cleanup has occurred or risk reduction been achieved? Can anyone tell me why, after the remedy has been selected, EPA has to spend millions of dollars – charged back to the PRPs, of course – to oversee the cleanup? Oversight costs can easily exceed 10% of cleanup costs, while oversight during the remedial design and feasibility study process sometimes seem to be barely less than the cost of actually performing the RI/FS.
While there are certainly a multiplicity of causes, there are two factors which greatly contribute to the problem. One was, coincidentally, highlighted in a post today by my friend Rob Stavins. As Rob noted, unlike the acid rain program, which was new at the time, the Superfund bureaucracy is well entrenched and there are a number of actors with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
The second issue relates to the genesis of the Superfund program, as well as its continuing raison d’être. Whenever EPA has ranked relative risks from different environmental hazards, Superfund sites come in at the bottom. However, if you think back to Superfund’s origins, what comes to mind? Love Canal and the Valley of the Drums – and some concerned near-by residents who rallied around a cause to ensure that the problem would be addressed. As renowned risk communications expert Dr. Peter Sandman has noted, there is not necessarily a significant correlation between actual risk levels and public outrage, and it’s not possible to decrease outrage simply by providing accurate information about risks.
In short, the public is outraged by hazardous waste sites and does not trust PRPs to clean them properly. All of those EPA oversight costs are, in large part, intended not to decrease risk, but to lower outrage. Outrage is understandable in some circumstances, and efforts to reduce it are laudable, but is it really an appropriate use of scarce environmental protection resources to spend the money that gets poured into Superfund sites?
There has to be a better way. Indeed, there is a better way. It’s called a privatized system in which PRPs have to meet well-defined cleanup standards, but are allowed to do so on their own, in whatever manner is most cost-effective, subject to audits by regulators. Privatized programs such as the one in Massachusetts are not perfect. However, their flaws – which largely stem from a failure to fully support privatization -- pale in comparison to the waste that is the federal program under CERCLA.
In other contexts, I’ve called on the Obama administration to embrace regulatory reform. Why not start with Superfund? Notwithstanding Rob Stavins’ point about the difficulty of overturning an entrenched status quo, if the states could do it, why not the federal government?
Besides, I have an entrenched personal reason for seeking Superfund reform. This stuff drives me nuts.
Another Loss For the Bush EPA; The D.C. Court of Appeals Remands the Fine Particulate Standard
The batting average of the Bush administration EPA in appeals of its regulatory proposals may now have dropped below the proverbial Mendoza line. This week, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia remanded a substantial part of EPA’s particulate rule. That the Bush administration could achieve results where the Mendoza line is even a close metaphor is a testament to just how low its stock has fallen in the courts.
The case itself is important for a number of reasons, but is too lengthy for detailed analysis here. Highlights include:
· First, the basic holding: the court remanded EPA’s primary annual standard for PM2.5, because EPA did not justify that the 15 ug/m3 standard was sufficient to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety. Second, the court also remanded EPA’s determination of the secondary, public welfare, standard for PM2.5.
· The court gave great weight to the role of the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee (CASAC) and staff recommendations in the regulatory process. After this decision, EPA is going to think twice about choosing a regulatory course difference than that recommended by CASAC and staff. On balance, I think that this is a bad thing and more evidence of the collateral damage from the extreme positions taken by the Bush administration. After all, while the Clean Air Act sets some boundaries, these are ultimately policy decisions that should be made by the President and his or her chosen staff, not by a committee no one’s heard of or low-level staff.
· Unlike the chaos created when the court vacated the CAIR regulations, the court appears to have learned its lesson. This time around, the court remanded the rule, but left the standard in place for now.
· The court’s decision to remand the public welfare standard will have implications for current efforts to implement the its Regional Haze Rule. The extent to which this decision throws Haze Rule implementation back to the drawing board may not be known for some time.
How many more cases can the Bush administration lose after it’s already out of office? At least one. Greenwire reports today about speculation that this decision means that the EPA rules regarding the nitrogen oxide NAAQS may also be in trouble.
The interesting question in all this is the extent to which the abysmal record of the Bush EPA in defending its decisions in the courts will damage EPA’s credibility and thus result in a long-term weakening of the deference given EPA by the courts. At this point, my assumption is that, in the long run, these cases will be seen as an aberration and courts will resume their prior practice of granting EPA substantial deference. Of course, whether that is a good thing or not is a separate question.
