Environmental litigation partner Stephen Fitzgerald has departed Morgan Lewis for Paul Hastings, the firm announced Thursday.
His addition comes three months after Paul Hastings recruited prominent Los Angeles environmental litigation partner Brian Israel to co-chair that practice.
“I look forward to collaborating with the firm’s prominent environmental litigators, who operate at the leading edge of the practice, and I’m excited to offer my clients access to all the firm’s leading practices across the country and around the world,” Fitzgerald, who also was a senior environmental counsel at Occidental earlier in his career, said in a statement.
His defense-side practice focuses on representing clients in state and federal enforcement actions, as well as private party lawsuits involving various federal environmental laws, including the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act.
Fitzgerald has experience in more than 180 environmental impact sites across all regions of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. His client roster has included AT&T, Celanese, Exxon Mobil, Oxy, PepsiCo, Shell, Sherwin-Williams, and Sunoco.
One client, Kevin Dunleavy, who is the assistant general counsel at Evergreen Resources Group, describes Fitzgerald as a “a calm, persistent and rational voice adeptly navigating through the challenges of an environmental enforcement action.”
In between his time at Oxy and Morgan Lewis, Fitzgerald also practiced at Baker Botts, where he made partner.
Over the last year Paul Hastings has added more than three dozen lawyers in Texas. In the announcement highlighting Fitzgerald, the firm noted ambitions to surpass 100 lawyers in Texas by the first quarter of 2025.