Practicing Environmental Law

"Environmental Law" covers a range of issues involving everything from liability due to industrial accidents to zoning as it affects development of shopping centers, houses, and other facilities. Neil Yoskin, who is interviewed below, specializes in an interdisciplinary field called Coastal Zone Management, which combines a number of issues that relate to the use of natural resources along the oceanfront.

As is in other areas of law, many environmental attorneys rarely, if ever, work in court. Instead, they spend much of their time working with clients, researching case law and writing legal briefs in preparation for resolving issues or applying for licenses and other regulatory approvals with agencies from local planning boards to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They also may participate in the drafting of new regulations.

Environmental attorneys work for private citizens, public interest groups, corporations, or real estate developers. They may also work for the government, "sitting on the other side of the table" in discussions with private attorneys.

Interview: Neil Yoskin

Neil Yoskin is a partner in the law firm of Bennett and Yoskin in Princeton, N.J. When he was "very young," he began thinking about law as a career. "My father wanted very badly for me to be a lawyer," Mr. Yoskin remembers. "To the point where he would bring home books for me about famous lawyers. By the time I was 14 or 15 years old, it was difficult for me to think of being anything other than a lawyer."

Mr. Yoskin majored in international relations at the University of Virginia before attending Temple University's School of Law in Philadelphia. In his first job after receiving his law degree, he was a representative at the 1975 United Nations Law of the Sea Conference in New York. "I was very interested in international relations and international law and marine affairs, and this was a good way to combine them," he explains. Next, he worked for a year in a Philadelphia law firm specializing in labor unions, then became an attorney with the New Jersey Office of Coastal Zone Management, a branch of the state's Department of Environmental Protection.

After six years in government, Mr. Yoskin returned to private practice as an environmental attorney. In 1988, he was a founding partner in the Trenton, N.J., law firm of Picco Mach Herbert Kennedy Jaffe and Yoskin. He remained there until he co-founded Bennett and Yoskin in 1995.

Q: How is it that you can to specialize in coastal zone issues?

The public policy issues that are at the root of coastal zone law fascinate me. For example, if you're considering building a marine terminal, you have competing policy issues around the fact that a lot of commerce is least expensively moved by water. So, a lot of companies want to move high volume, low profit commodities - like sand and stone - by water. You're trying to balance that with the fact that to build facilities to handle shipping you sometimes have to dredge or fill a water body, and that has an adverse environmental impact. So what you're trying to gauge is how adverse is the impact, and whether the impact from the project is more than offset by the advantages.

You know, in any profession you're dealing with a particular set of circumstances. If you're fascinated by airplanes, then it's interesting to do aviation law. If you're fascinated by medicine, it's interesting to be a personal injury lawyer. But if you're not fascinated by those things, being a lawyer can be very dreary. I think any profession is like that. There are things in any job that are enjoyable and others which aren't. What I tried to do was maximize the things that are enjoyable to me.

On a very practical level, if you're an environmental lawyer, if you're wetlands lawyer, you have to go see the site with a client, it's great. You know, on a nice day you're down at the shore, walking through the sand dunes or walking through a wetland. How many people get to do that?

Q: To you, what was the hardest part of becoming an attorney?

Law school.

Q: Why?

There's just an enormous, enormous amount of work to do in law school. It's not always intellectually stimulating. So, that would be the hardest part of becoming a lawyer.

Many law schools adhere to the Socratic method of teaching - meaning that the professors teach through dialog with the student. The student must know the material. That means in any given course you might have between six and ten cases to learn to be prepared for a particular class. It used to be common that professors would berate students and embarrass them if they weren't prepared. That's not as common as it used to be. But this was what you were trying to do each and every day. You just had an enormous, enormous amount of reading. You would generally read and brief cases, meaning you would take notes and prepare summaries of cases before class, so that the class was more meaningful to you.

Q: What is a typical day like for you?

Today's a good example of the typical day. I got here at 7:30 this morning because it's Monday, and Mondays are busy days. Clients call a lot. And like many people in lots of professions, I find that I can sit down and just get some things done quietly from 7:30 to 8:30 in the morning and then after 5:30 at night.

So, I got here at 7:30. I entered my billing time from last Friday on my computer. Then I have a very important meeting at New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection today at 2. I have a client who is developing one of the largest pieces of urban waterfront land in the world. This meeting has a lot of participants, so I drafted an agenda for the meeting and I faxed it to everybody.

In a typical day, I'll get between 40 and 50 telephone calls. I'll try and take them if I can. If I'm doing something on a deadline, I'll have messages taken for me. I know that's a lot of calls, and I spend most of my day on the phone. Which means you have to work at night a lot. I usually do multiple tasks at once: I'm writing a letter at the same time that I'm talking to people on the phone. I may be actually composing more than one letter at the same time.

The one thing I find that I must set time aside for is brief writing. A brief is a document that you submit to a court which analyzes factual issues in the context of legal precedence. Brief writing really requires concentration and thought and that absolutely requires that you set aside time for it.

One of the truths I have found is that there's not enough time in the day to get everything done that you want to do. If you're a high-energy person that's okay, because you can work at night and work in the morning. A common complaint I've heard among professionals is that nobody has the time to do things as carefully or as thoughtfully as they'd like to do.

Q: You've been a lawyer for twenty years, now. Is being a lawyer as you thought it would be?

Yes and no. The yes is that the law is much as I thought it would be. The issues of dealing with the law are much as I thought they would be. What I couldn't possibly know, because I was young, is that dealing with clients and dealing with the business aspects of law are much bigger aspects of law practice than I ever thought they would be.

Law is a very personal, hands-on business in the sense that you're dealing with people whose property is at stake. I don't do criminal law, so I'm not dealing with people whose freedom is at stake. But I'm dealing with property owners, and there are very few things that are more important to people than their property rights. So, I'm dealing with people who are frequently upset, because they're dealing with a bureaucracy that's trying to deprive them of the use of their property in some way.

When you're a lawyer, when you're a partner in a law firm, you're also a businessman. Lawyers can be excellent lawyers but be lousy businessmen. That's one thing that people don't always understand.

Q: So, what is the best part of your job?

Well, right now, in a new practice, it's not the money, although at one time it was.

I think the best part of my job is doing it well. When you've done something as well as you feel you can do it, that feels good. For example, I've argued in the State Supreme Court. I prepared for it well and I presented it well. I was incredibly charged and excited when I left that day. That kind of thing is probably the best part. That and enjoying personal relationships or developing personal relationships with clients.

Q: What's the hardest part of the job?

To me, the hardest part is dealing with the frustration of not getting everything done the way I'd like to get it done. At the end of the day, there's always 12 things that I still want to do.

Another frustrating part is losing cases that you should win. One of the things that lawyers discover is the courts are fallible and they make mistakes. It's not just a matter of judgment on my part. There are certain realities you have to face, particularly in environmental law. For example, when you litigate with the government, by and large government wins. Frequently they shouldn't, and that's very frustrating.

It's not because you haven't done your job, it's just because the court figures, "Ah, it's DEP and they must know what they're doing." I say that casually, but it's a reality that's well recognized by lawyers. It's a fundamental principal of administrative law that courts assume that agencies have greater expertise in the matter than they do and they will therefore defer to the agency action unless it is clearly arbitrary and capricious. That's the standard. What frustrates me the most is when I can't convince somebody of a position that I know to be correct.

Q: So despite all the intellectual power that goes with the law, it's actually a very human thing.

Yes, very human, and that's a fascinating thing to find out.

Q: Looking back, if you had it all to do over again, what would you do differently?

I would try to get a judicial clerkship: work for a judge. It took me a long time to learn about law and procedure and all the things that at one time did not interest me - like the rules of civil procedure - that I now find interesting. I think the most educational thing you can do, the thing that can best prepare you to be a lawyer, is to work for a judge.

Q: What advice would you give to someone who wants to be an attorney? What kind of things should they do?

They should try to work in a law office before they go to law school to see what it's like. Often, their county bar associations will have placement programs, but the best thing to do is just call or write the law firms in their communities. If their parents know a lawyer, that's a good way to approach. It's the best way, really. They may get little or no money and they're certainly not going to have positions of authority, but it's still a good way to learn.

Also, students should go to court. Courtrooms are open; you can just go to trials. It's hard to get away from school or know when there's going to be a trial, so I guess the best way to do it is through school. But somehow, go to court.

If they want to really be excited about the law, students should go to the Supreme Court, at least in their state, and see oral argument. That's where the law is at its most pure.

There's an understanding most lawyers share that at some point you have to drop the emotional arguments and deal with the law. People think that the law is cold in that respect, but that ultimately is the way the system works best. Where that takes place is in appellate argument. When you get to appellate argument, particularly at the Supreme Court, you have a level of knowledge and understanding of the case that's generally very high and very refined.

It's not television law, because it's not a trial. Trials are very interesting to see because of the lack of flow in them. I think a lot of people learned that from the OJ Simpson trial. There's always motions, there's always objections, there's always postponements. In the Supreme Court, you have a half an hour to make your case. It's the kind of experience that makes you want to be a lawyer.

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