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Pierce Atwood serves as national coordinating counsel on all environmental matters for a pulp and paper company with operations in New England, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. This role involves providing regular advice and counsel on issues such as compliance strategies for air emissions regulations, such as boiler MACT and BART, managing a potential river re-designation that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance costs, permitting a secure vault for storage of hazardous waste, and advising the company on day-to-day operations issues about issues ranging from management of contaminated soils to stormwater compliance. In this capacity, we work closely with company lawyers, corporate environmental staff, and environmental staff from each individual mill, as well as local counsel in various jurisdictions.
Lead negotiator for major property and casualty insurance company on enterprise performance management software contract. Successfully introduced and negotiated solution to an inter-operability issue that threatened to sink the deal.
Led negotiation team for independent statewide health information exchange in negotiation of key information technology agreements for full scale deployment of one of the first (and largest) statewide health information exchanges in the country using clinical data.
Lead negotiator on behalf of a New England-based insurance company in connection with replacing a home-grown IT system (including self-hosted servers and legacy software platforms) with an outsourced core insurance platform consisting of a policy administration system, claims processing and settlement solution, rating engine and underwriting and decisioning tools. When the vendor’s in-house counsel proved to be an obstacle to compromise and progress, we suggested and implemented strategies to minimize counsel’s role to enable the vendor’s senior business leaders to make key decisions.
On behalf of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), we are assisting with drafting a new Electricity Market Law for Azerbaijan, to enable Azerbaijan's transition towards compliance with European Union requirements. NARUC is supporting the Ministry of Energy of Azerbaijan on drafting the new law and creating a new market model for its electricity. The working committees set up by the Acting Minister of Energy include representatives from the Ministries of Energy and Economy, the two key utilities, other governmental agencies, the US Embassy and the USAID Mission.
Since 2017, Pierce Atwood has represented Avangrid Networks, Inc. and its affiliates CMP and NECEC Transmission LLC on all aspects of the development of the New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC), a $1 billion, 147-mile high-voltage direct current transmission line that will interconnect the New England transmission system with the Hydro-Quebec (HQ) transmission system at the Canadian border in western Maine. The NECEC will deliver 1,200 MW of hydropower generated by Hydro-Quebec to the New England grid around the clock for at least 40 years. As found by the Maine PUC, this project promises to reduce the cost of electricity in Maine and New England by tens of millions of dollars each year, increase the reliability of the New England electric grid, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3.0-3.6 million metric tons annually (the equivalent of removing 700,000 cars from the road).
Representation of the Skating Club of Boston in the acquisition and development of a new, state-of-the-art, three-rink, 4,000-seat skating facility on University Avenue in Norwood, Massachusetts. We have assisted the Skating Club in all aspects of site acquisition, title matters (including clearing some old reciprocal easements for an office park that was never developed), zoning, wetlands and MEPA permitting, payment in lieu taxes agreements, and development agreements. We also represented the Skating Club in the sale of its existing facility at 1234 and 1240 Soldier’s Field Road in Boston.
Pierce Atwood represented Great Bay Renewables in connection with its establishment of a $10.1 million interconnection deposit loan facility to support its development partner, Hexagon Energy.
Assisting Cate Street’s subsidiary Newco Energy in development and $275 million new market tax credit and Section 1603 financing of its biomass plant in Berlin, New Hampshire.
Represented NEWSME Landfill Operations, LLC, the operator of Maine’s largest state-owned landfill, in separate projects to license a 7 million cubic yard vertical increase in disposal capacity and to accept municipal solid waste for disposal. Both projects involved successful defenses of appeals to the Maine Board of Environmental Protection.
