primarily on climate change. Once again,
30 years after entering environmental law,
he finds himself on the cutting edge of an
emerging field. And he’s attracted to it for
the same reason he was attracted to this
practice area in the first place: a lifelong
interest in environmental protection.
“This field is about problem-solving
among competing—usually legitimate—
interests, and trying to bring people to a
resolution so that they can get something
done and move on,” he says. “In the best
tradition of the profession, lawyers are
problem-solvers, as opposed to problem-makers. And as problem-solvers you have to
respect the variety of interests that have an
important position on a lot of these issues,
the political process, the regulatory process
and the litigation process.”
ONE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL LAWYERS
Marten knows well works only a few
blocks over and a bit down the hill toward
Elliott Bay. He is also working on the BP
case. Samuel “Billy” Plauché IV, as his
Cajun name implies, has far more direct
ties to Louisiana than Marten. His father
owns a law firm in Louisiana. As did his
grandfather. And his great-grandfather.
After an interview process by the office of
Gov. Bobby Jindal, Plauché’s small firm was
picked to help in the administrative end
of Louisiana’s litigation of the Deepwater
Horizon spill, handling such matters as
assessing natural resource damages and
evaluating ways to restore the environment.
“I was very honored to be selected,”
Plauché says. “Our lead clients [in the
BP case] are the Coastal Protection and
Restoration Authority, and the Louisiana
Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office. My passion
for restoring Louisiana’s coastlines is all of a
sudden front and center every day in what I’m
Plauché grew up in south Louisiana, in
the heart of Cajun country in the city of
Lafayette. His parents had a camp on the
shore of Calcasieu Lake, nestled among
the bayous between Lake Charles and
the Gulf of Mexico. Plauché came to love
hunting, fishing, and being surrounded by
the swamps and wetlands of bayou country.
A self-described “country boy,” the voluble
Plauché left the bayou—but even 2,000
miles away, the bayou has never left him.
When he came out of law school
in 1990, Plauché’s first interest was
environmental law, and like Marten before
him, he saw the relatively new body of law
and regulations as a challenging, dynamic
field. From 1991 to 1995 he worked for
the U.S. Department of Justice in D.C.,
litigating environmental cases that crossed
the boundaries of district offices or had the
potential to set national precedents.
