Don’s extensive environmental counseling practice enables him to represent his clients effectively in rulemakings, enforcement, and appellate litigation.
His environmental litigation, negotiation and enforcement experience allows him to evaluate complex and nuanced environmental issues that arise in environmental due diligence and the drafting of stock and asset purchase agreements. Moreover, his experience with many federal and state environmental programs – Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) hazardous and solid waste, state medical and infectious waste, the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Clean Air Act (CAA), Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD), New Source Review (NSR), minor source permitting, federal and state reporting, and others – enables him to approach and settle environmental problems—including government and citizen suit enforcement—with a holistic approach that resolves environmental and health claims, economic issues, and toxic tort and reputational concerns.
Facilitated by his broad experience, Don serves in an outside general counsel role for the Pharmaceutical Product Stewardship Working Group and the MED-Project, consortiums of pharmaceutical companies formed to respond to and comply with multiple local and state household unwanted medicine and sharps takeback programs in California, Washington, New York, and Massachusetts.
He is a former member of the firm’s Management Committee and previous chair of the firm’s Environmental Practice Group.
After law school, Don moved to Washington, DC to begin his 35-year career in the private practice of environmental law and environmental litigation. Don has built his practice around the principle that varied experience in a wide range of substantive areas of environmental law and in multiple types of representation allows him to deliver sophisticated, innovative and cost-effective environmental and related legal services to his pharmaceutical, oil and gas, mining and manual processing, retail, and other clients.
More Legal and Business Bylines From Donald J. Patterson, Jr.
- DC Circuit Denies Petition Challenging Transfer-Based Exclusion under RCRA - (Posted On Thursday, July 18, 2019)
- California Adopts Statewide Producer-Funded Pharmaceutical Household Drug and Sharps Take-Back Program - (Posted On Monday, October 08, 2018)
- D.C. Circuit Invalidates Part of the RCRA Definition of “Solid Waste,” Altering the Regulatory Framework for Recycling of Hazardous Secondary Materials - (Posted On Friday, July 14, 2017)
- EPA Requests Comment on Tentative Denial of Petition to Expand Dramatically RCRA Corrosivity Characteristic - (Posted On Tuesday, April 12, 2016)
- Environmentalists Issue Notice of Intent to Sue EPA for Alleged Failure to Review and Revise RCRA Oil and Gas Regulations - (Posted On Saturday, October 17, 2015)
- EPA Proposes New Rules for Pharmaceutical Wastes That Qualify as RCRA Hazardous Wastes - (Posted On Friday, September 11, 2015)
- EPA Commits to Respond in Early 2016 to Petition Seeking to Make the RCRA Corrosivity Characteristic 10 Times More Stringent - (Posted On Friday, April 24, 2015)
- EPA Revisions to Definition of “Solid Waste” Change the Regulatory Landscape for Hazardous Recyclable Materials - (Posted On Wednesday, January 14, 2015)
- Ninth Circuit Upholds Alameda Safe Drug Disposal Ordinance, Triggering Implementation of King County Secure Medicine Return Rule - (Posted On Sunday, October 12, 2014)
- DEA Controlled Substance Disposal Requirements Take Effect October 9, 2014 - (Posted On Friday, September 19, 2014)