PRACTICE AREAS

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The New Jersey Spill Compensation and Control Act is among the most powerful environmental liability statutes in the country. Its strict liability framework imposes cleanup obligations without regard to fault. Its broad definition of covered discharges reaches a wide range of substances and conditions that other statutes would leave unaddressed. Its fee-shifting provisions create leverage that shapes settlement negotiations as profoundly as the underlying liability analysis. And its interaction with CERCLA, the common law, and New Jersey’s remediation regulatory framework generates legal questions of genuine complexity that demand counsel with both deep statutory knowledge and technical fluency in the contamination science the statute was designed to address.

Kalman Law, P.C. has concentrated a substantial part of its litigation practice in Spill Act proceedings since the firm’s founding. Mr. Kalman litigated Spill Act matters as an associate at McCusker, Anselmi, Rosen & Carvelli before establishing his own firm. The breadth of that experience, combined with a scientific background that is unusual among Spill Act practitioners, informs every dimension of the firm’s approach to these cases.

The Technical Dimension of Spill Act Litigation

Spill Act cost-recovery and contribution actions are, at bottom, disputes about contamination: what was discharged, where it migrated, what it cost to address, and which parties bear responsibility for what share of those costs. Those questions are scientific before they are legal. The answers emerge from the remedial investigation data, the groundwater modeling, the contaminant fate-and-transport analysis, and the source identification methodology, not from the pleadings.

Counsel who cannot engage that technical record with genuine competence, who must accept an opposing expert’s characterization of the data because they lack the background to challenge it, operate at a structural disadvantage in Spill Act litigation that legal skill alone cannot fully overcome. Mr. Kalman’s background as a hydrogeologist addresses that disadvantage directly. He evaluates the technical record the way a hydrogeologist evaluates it: rigorously, skeptically, and with direct knowledge of how contaminated sites actually behave. That capability shapes the firm’s litigation strategy from the outset.

The Firm’s Spill Act Practice

The firm represents private clients on both sides of Spill Act proceedings, in the Superior Court of New Jersey and, where federal jurisdiction exists, in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey. Its Spill Act practice encompasses prosecution of cost-recovery and contribution actions on behalf of parties who have borne a disproportionate share of remediation costs; defense of contribution claims and cost-recovery actions against clients facing demands that exceed what the evidence and the equities support; multi-party allocation proceedings, including the coordination of defense and prosecution strategies for potentially responsible party groups; defense of government-initiated enforcement proceedings and natural resource damage claims; settlement negotiation and alternative dispute resolution in multi-party contamination disputes; and technical coordination with environmental consultants and expert witnesses on source identification, remedial cost evaluation, and damages quantification.

New Jersey’s Industrial Site Recovery Act and Site Remediation Reform Act together constitute the regulatory architecture governing contaminated property transactions and site remediation programs in one of the most heavily industrialized, and most heavily regulated, states in the country. For businesses operating in New Jersey, compliance with both statutes is not a matter of preference. The consequences of error, including delayed or unwound transactions, regulatory enforcement, personal liability for officers and directors, and remediation obligations that were neither anticipated nor priced, are severe enough that the question is never whether to seek counsel but when.

The Industrial Site Recovery Act

ISRA is triggered by the transfer of ownership or operations of an industrial establishment, a category defined broadly enough that its application frequently surprises parties who did not anticipate it. When triggered, it imposes a mandatory pre-transaction remediation or approval process that, if not navigated with care, will delay or prevent closing. Its procedural requirements are exacting. Its exemptions and alternative compliance mechanisms require careful analysis of both the statutory language and NJDEP guidance to deploy effectively.

The firm’s ISRA practice includes applicability determinations for contemplated transactions involving commercial and industrial properties; preparation and submission of General Information Notices and Preliminary Assessments; compliance strategy development, including evaluation of de minimis quantity exemptions, remediation-in-place agreements, and other alternative mechanisms; negotiation with the NJDEP regarding compliance obligations and timelines; due diligence counseling for purchasers, sellers, and lenders on ISRA-triggered transactions; and post-closing compliance oversight and remediation coordination.

The Site Remediation Reform Act

The SRRA restructured the remediation process in New Jersey by transferring primary oversight authority from the NJDEP to Licensed Site Remediation Professionals while preserving the agency’s audit and enforcement powers. The practical consequence for responsible parties is a remediation program that is simultaneously more flexible and more technically demanding than what preceded it, one that requires active, informed management of the LSRP relationship, careful attention to regulatory deadlines, and a thorough understanding of the standards that govern each phase of the remediation process.

The firm’s SRRA practice includes counseling on LSRP selection, engagement, scope of authority, and management; critical review and analysis of Remedial Investigation Reports, Remedial Action Workplans, and Remedial Action Reports from the perspective of a practitioner who has prepared such documents himself; evaluation of the technical and legal sufficiency of Response Action Outcomes and Final Remediation Documents; representation in NJDEP audit proceedings and enforcement matters; and strategic counsel on remediation standards, institutional controls, engineering controls, and post-remediation obligations.

The firm’s principal brings to ISRA and SRRA matters something that cannot be acquired in a law library: direct, practical experience with the remediation process from the technical side. Matthew Kalman has prepared remedial action workplans, managed site investigations, and negotiated with regulatory agencies as a hydrogeologist. He does not merely read the documents his clients’ LSRPs produce. He evaluates them with the critical eye of someone who has produced them.

Environmental litigation is technically demanding in a way that most commercial litigation is not. The factual record is built as much from remedial investigation reports, groundwater modeling analyses, expert hydrogeologic opinions, and agency-generated data as from documentary evidence and witness testimony. The contested questions, including where the contamination originated, how it migrated, when it began, what it costs to address, and who bears responsibility for what share, are scientific questions before they are legal ones. They do not yield to advocacy alone.

This is the structural reality that defines what effective environmental litigation counsel must be. Legal knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. What is also required is the ability to engage the technical record on its own terms: to evaluate an opposing expert’s groundwater model, to identify the assumptions embedded in a contaminant fate-and-transport analysis, to assess the reasonableness of a remediation cost estimate against what the field data actually shows, and to use that technical analysis to shape the litigation strategy, not as a footnote to the legal argument but as its foundation.

Matthew Kalman spent more than eleven years as a hydrogeologist before more than two decades as an environmental litigator. He has worked, personally and hands-on, on large-scale contaminated site investigations at Superfund sites, petroleum refineries, and petrochemical facilities. He reads technical documents the way they were written. He evaluates expert opinions against his own independent technical judgment. And he builds litigation strategy on the integration of that scientific analysis with the governing law.

Practice Scope

The firm’s litigation practice is concentrated in the Superior Court of New Jersey and the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey. The firm handles prosecution and defense of cost-recovery and contribution actions under the New Jersey Spill Compensation and Control Act; CERCLA cost-recovery and contribution proceedings in federal court, including multi-party PRP group coordination; defense of government-initiated enforcement actions under CERCLA, RCRA, the Clean Water Act, and New Jersey counterpart statutes; defense of natural resource damage claims brought by federal and state trustees; citizen suits under federal and state environmental statutes; and personal injury and premises liability claims arising from alleged exposure to hazardous substances.

Over the course of his career, Mr. Kalman served for nearly two decades as counsel to a major integrated energy company and has represented additional petroleum, pharmaceutical, and chemical-manufacturing clients, insurers, and self-insured entities in large-scale environmental proceedings, including complex multi-party Superfund and Spill Act matters.

For a client facing significant environmental remediation liability, the most consequential legal question is frequently not the scope of the underlying cleanup obligation. It is whether insurance exists to fund it. The answer to that question can determine whether a remediation cost that would otherwise threaten a business’s viability is instead substantially borne by insurers who collected premiums against precisely that risk.

Environmental coverage disputes are among the most legally and technically complex proceedings in the field. The policies at issue are frequently decades old, written in language whose application to modern environmental liability was not contemplated when the policies were issued. The pollution exclusion and its exceptions have generated an extensive body of New Jersey case law that rewards careful analysis and punishes superficial reading. And the framework established by the New Jersey Supreme Court in Owens-Illinois, Inc. v. United Insurance Co. for allocating environmental liability across multiple insurers and multiple policy periods requires counsel who can manage a proceeding of substantial legal and factual complexity while simultaneously engaging the underlying environmental record, because the contamination facts drive the coverage analysis as surely as the policy language does.

Kalman Law, P.C. represents policyholders. The firm assists clients in prosecuting coverage claims for both defense costs and indemnification under comprehensive general liability and pollution legal liability policies. It brings to coverage proceedings the same technical rigor it brings to its remediation and litigation practice, because the contamination timeline, the nature of the discharge, and the progression of the cleanup are not background facts in a coverage dispute. They are the facts on which the coverage outcome turns.

Practice Scope

Prosecution of coverage claims for defense costs and indemnification under CGL and pollution legal liability policies; duty-to-defend proceedings, including analysis of the complaint-allegation rule and its application to environmental claims; Owens-Illinois allocation proceedings, including analysis, strategy, and representation across multi-insurer, multi-period matters; environmental coverage opinions and analysis for policyholders evaluating the strength and scope of existing coverage; bad-faith and extra-contractual litigation; procurement counsel for cost-cap, environmental impairment liability, and pollution legal liability policies; and risk management counseling and evaluation of existing insurance portfolios for adequacy of environmental coverage.

Every contaminated site presents a distinct combination of regulatory obligation, technical complexity, and liability exposure. The goal, closure achieved as quickly and cost-effectively as the science and the regulatory framework permit, is constant. The path to it is not. It requires counsel who can evaluate the technical record with genuine competence, negotiate with regulatory agencies from a position of informed authority, manage the relationship between the legal strategy and the remediation program, and anticipate the transactional and litigation dimensions of a site’s history before they become problems.

Matthew Kalman brings to contaminated site remediation a level of technical engagement that is uncommon among environmental attorneys and that materially affects the quality of the representation. His background is not that of a lawyer who has read extensively about environmental science. It is that of a hydrogeologist who managed remediation projects, who designed remedial action workplans, supervised field investigations, and negotiated with the NJDEP over the scope of cleanups, across a career of more than eleven years before he entered the law. That experience does not merely inform his legal advice. It changes the questions he asks of consultants, the positions he advances with agencies, and the strategies he recommends to clients.

Practice Scope

Remediation strategy development and regulatory counseling under the New Jersey Spill Act, ISRA, and SRRA; negotiation with the NJDEP and the USEPA regarding the scope of site investigations, applicable remediation standards, and cleanup timelines; critical review and analysis of remedial investigation reports, remedial action workplans, and proposed remedial action outcomes from a technically trained perspective; oversight of Licensed Site Remediation Professionals and management of the client’s relationship with environmental consultants; prosecution and defense of cost-recovery and contribution actions arising from remediation expenditures; defense of government-initiated enforcement actions and natural resource damage claims; Brownfields redevelopment counseling, including identification and pursuit of public funding, tax incentives, and grant programs; and transaction support for contaminated property acquisitions, divestitures, and financings, including ISRA compliance and post-closing remediation obligations.

Every significant commercial real estate transaction and corporate acquisition in New Jersey carries environmental risk. This is not a generalization. It is a product of the state’s industrial history, among the most extensive in the country, and its regulatory framework, which is among the most demanding. The question in any New Jersey transaction involving commercial or industrial property is not whether environmental risk exists. It is whether the risk has been identified accurately, quantified realistically, and allocated correctly before the transaction closes.

Parties who discover, after closing, that environmental liability was mischaracterized in the due diligence process, that the Phase I was perfunctory, that the Phase II conclusions do not survive scrutiny, that the ISRA applicability analysis was wrong, or that the contract’s environmental provisions left exposure that could and should have been addressed, have experienced the failure mode this firm exists to prevent.

Kalman Law, P.C. advises purchasers, sellers, lenders, and corporate parties on the environmental dimensions of real property and business entity transactions. The firm’s technical background allows it to evaluate due diligence findings with a depth that goes beyond legal analysis. Mr. Kalman can assess what a Phase I or Phase II investigation actually found, determine whether the consultant’s conclusions are technically defensible, and advise clients on the real magnitude of the environmental risk, not merely its legal characterization. That capability is the difference between environmental due diligence that protects a client and environmental due diligence that only creates the appearance of having done so.

Practice Scope

Environmental due diligence oversight for acquisitions and divestitures of commercial and industrial properties, including critical review of Phase I and Phase II investigation reports; ISRA applicability determinations and full compliance strategy for transactions implicating industrial site review; drafting and negotiation of environmental provisions in purchase and sale agreements, merger agreements, and loan documents; procurement and negotiation of environmental liability insurance, including cost-cap and pollution legal liability policies; evaluation and negotiation of prospective purchaser agreements and other statutory defenses to CERCLA and Spill Act liability; secured creditor counseling under CERCLA; and post-closing environmental compliance counseling and remediation oversight.