Tom Lotterman handles a wide variety of litigation matters, including environmental, toxic tort, commercial, and trade secret. He represents clients before federal courts, state courts, and agencies from Alaska to Florida. Tom has handled large, multiparty cases in Alabama, Florida, New York, and North Carolina, and has conducted numerous arbitrations before the American Arbitration Association and other associations. His clients have included large oil and natural gas companies, international utilities, national trade associations, and manufacturing companies.
Tom handled the first trial under the Superfund Recycling Equity Act amendments to CERCLA, and one of the first arbitrations under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. He has obtained injunctions halting implementation of state regulations, banning the sale of products containing misappropriated trade secrets, and stopping construction of a major highway project. Tom has defended clients in high-profile enforcement actions brought by the federal government and the New York Attorney General’s Office involving the Clean Air Act, CERCLA and RCRA. He also has conducted internal whistleblower investigations for several large companies.
In the 1980s, Tom was a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice. While there, he successfully defended EPA’s national effluent guidelines for the placer mining industry in a legal challenge before the Ninth Circuit. He defended federal facilities in environmental cases, prosecuted violations of the Clean Water Act, and spearheaded a federal task force that challenged the constitutionality of state regulatory fees.
Tom contributes a significant portion of his time to pro bono matters. He served as general counsel to the Project on National Security Reform — a nonpartisan initiative funded by Congress to recommend improvements to the U.S. national security system. The Project issued its final report in December 2008, entitled “Forging a New Shield,” which represented the efforts of more than 300 national security experts from think tanks, universities, federal agencies, law firms and corporations, including several former National Security Advisors.
Tom is an adjunct professor of law at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C.
