Insights

Washington – January 10, 2022: Crowell & Moring represented the founders of Aerial Armor in the sale of the company to Dedrone Holdings Inc., a leader in smart airport security.

Washington – January 3, 2022: Crowell & Moring elected 13 lawyers to the firm’s partnership, effective January 1, 2022. The firm also promoted seven to the position of senior counsel and 19 associates to the position of counsel. The new partners have been promoted from within the ranks of the firm’s London, New York, and Washington, D.C. offices and from across several practice groups, including Advertising & Media; Antitrust & Competition; Corporate; Energy; Environment & Natural Resources; Government Contracts; Health Care; Technology & Intellectual Property; International Dispute Resolution; Litigation; Mass Tort, Product, and Consumer Litigation; and Privacy & Cybersecurity.

Washington – February 22, 2019: Crowell & Moring LLP is pleased to announce that its Government Contracts Group has been recognized as one of Law360’s “Practice Groups of the Year” for government contracts. This is the ninth consecutive year that the group has earned this honor.

A wave of recent changes in federal and state law pertaining to PFAS chemicals is likely to present both immediate and long-term challenges to the government contracting community. At the federal level, contractors that import products, parts, packaging, equipment or other articles with components that contain PFAS must confront new and extensive regulatory reporting requirements relating to such imports going back to 2011, and they must do so by May 2025. At the state level, a growing list of states are enacting total bans on the sale and distribution of such products and components. On top of this flurry of environmental regulatory activity, the Biden Administration continues to direct federal agencies to develop procurement strategies that prioritize the purchase of PFAS-free articles as part the Administration’s broader effort to leverage the federal procurement function in pursuit of climate and sustainability policy objectives.

Front of mind for many federal contractors is the proposed FAR rule that would make federal contract awards contingent upon meeting mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions requirements. But a provision in the recently enacted National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 scales back the reach of that potential rule on Department of Defense (DoD) contracts.

On September 21, 2023, the White House directed federal agencies to incorporate interim Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (SC-GHG) estimates into a wide range of federal agency actions, including each agency’s procurement function.  This most recent direction builds upon the Administration’s ongoing and wide-reaching effort (examples discussed here and here) to leverage federal procurement spending in pursuit of climate change and sustainability policy objectives.  The hallmark of that effort to date had been a proposed rule that would, if finalized, require thousands of federal contractors to inventory, publicly disclose, and, in some cases, seek reductions in GHG emissions (see our prior discussion here).  However, the White House’s incorporation of SC-GHG into the federal procurement process has the potential to be just as significant to the contracting community by providing a cost metric (in dollars) needed for contracting agencies to evaluate and confer a preference on bids and contractors with lower GHG emission profiles.

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations are being elevated in corporate, corporate stakeholder, and regulator discourse as never before. Many companies are experiencing ESG pressures for the first time, and indeed they may seem new to entire industries. However, ESG has become an essential institutional investor criteria and will increasingly need to be integrated into the supply and value chains of public and private corporations as financial and other regulators catch up.

Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.

Please join members of Crowell & Moring’s Environment and Natural Resources Group, with special guest speaker Patricia Spitzley, Deputy Redevelopment Manager and Director of Government Relations for the RACER Trust, for a webinar as they explore the Biden Administration’s focus on environmental justice through an ESG lens.