International law firm Dorsey & Whitney LLP announced today that Thomas A. Lorenzen has joined the Regulatory Affairs group in the Firm’s Washington, D.C. office as a partner. Mr. Lorenzen joins Dorsey from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, where he has been an Assistant Chief since 2004. During that time, he supervised the federal government’s legal defense of all Environmental Protection Agency rules, regulations and other final actions judicially reviewable under the various federal pollution control statutes.
Over his career at the Justice Department, Mr. Lorenzen has managed or personally litigated dozens of seminal environmental cases under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, and other federal pollution control statutes. Notable cases for which he has recently been responsible include Massachusetts v. EPA and Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA (in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act and the D.C. Circuit subsequently upheld its suite of greenhouse gas regulations), and Entergy Corp. v. Riverkeeper (in which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the EPA’s authority to weigh costs against benefits in determining how to regulate cooling water intake structures under the Clean Water Act).
Mr. Lorenzen has worked closely over the years with the White House, EPA and other federal agencies to develop and hone many of the rules that he and his team later defended. He is a recipient of numerous Department of Justice awards, including the prestigious John Marshall Award for Providing Legal Advice, awarded by the Attorney General in 2010 for his work with the White House, EPA and the Department of Transportation in developing the Light-duty Motor Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Rule. For 12 years before joining the Department of Justice in 1997, Mr. Lorenzen was in private practice, where he developed expertise in environmental compliance counseling and due diligence, trial court and appellate litigation, and corporate transactional practice. He received a JD from Harvard Law School in 1985 and a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1982.
“Tom Lorenzen is a preeminent environmental lawyer with deep litigation experience in the highest courts of the United States and exceptional insight into government policy both in rulemaking and enforcement,” said Dorsey partner B. Andrew Brown, head of the Firm’s global Regulatory Affairs group. “He will add a great new dimension to Dorsey’s Regulatory Affairs group, which serves clients around the world not only in environmental but also in energy, mining and natural resources and a wide range of other areas.”
Mr. Lorenzen noted, “I am delighted to be returning to private practice by joining Dorsey & Whitney. Dorsey’s global reach and full-service platform will allow me to leverage my experience at Justice, to work with a strong group of regulatory lawyers nationwide and to serve a great range of superb clients.”
