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Susan M. Cooke is a partner in the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery LLP based in the Firm's Boston office. She heads the Firm-wide Environmental Practice Group and serves as partner-in-charge of the Boston office. Prior to entering law firm practice, she served as an enforcement attorney in the New England Regional Office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and also worked as a patent attorney in the private sector.
Susan has worked on environmental and health and safety requirements throughout the United States and in foreign countries. Her practice has covered a wide range of programs, including regulatory analyses and counseling, enforcement actions, permitting and registration activities, brownfields redevelopment, transactional practice, and development of legislative and regulatory proposals.
Susan has represented clients before agencies and authorities on a variety of permitting and enforcement issues. These have included work on the permitting and siting of hazardous and solid waste facilities, manufacturing facilities and various petroleum operations; redevelopment of brownfields sites for commercial use; development of the first waiver under state chemical regulation law to expedite construction of an industrial facility; and procurement of the first exemption in the country from the premanufacture notification requirements under the federal Toxic Substances Control Act. She has also been active in the representation of clients charged with liability for the cleanup of contaminated sites and in the redevelopment of brownfields sites, and has published on brownfields developments. She has chaired groups of potentially responsible parties, led Superfund negotiations and conceptualized and achieved innovative cleanup settlements.
Susan is one of the originators of environmental opinions now used in many large corporate and real estate transactions throughout the country. She has also supervised a number of environmental due diligence reviews of industrial and commercial properties and large residential developments and has lectured and written on this topic and on land use issues associated with development work.
Susan also counsels industrial and commercial companies on a wide range of environmental compliance issues. She has been successful in obtaining favorable agency interpretations on a variety of complex environmental regulations, particularly those involving chemical control and registration and waste management and cleanup requirements. She has also authored a number of legislative and regulatory proposals that have now been adopted, including parts of the Environmental Protection Agency's confidential business information regulations and a prototype of the so-called "Gore factors" utilized under the federal Superfund law.
Susan is the editor-in-chief and principal author of a leading treatise, The Law of Hazardous Waste, and has been a co-editor and contributing author of two editions of the Massachusetts Environmental Law Handbook. She is listed in Who's Who in America, Best Lawyers in America, The International Who's Who of Business Lawyers, Massachusetts Super Lawyers and as a number one ranking environmental attorney in Chambers USA.
In addition to her undergraduate and law school work, Susan was a special student in electrical engineering at M.I.T. Susan is admitted to practice in Massachusetts and before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. She has chaired the Hazardous Waste Subcommittee of the American Bar Association Business Section Committee on Environmental, Energy and Natural Resources Law for several years and is a board member of Zoo New England.
Education:
Boston University School of Law, J.D., 1970
Emmanuel College (MA), B.A., 1967 | 