Share
Earlier this week, the City of Chicago filed a lawsuit against Monsanto and other chemical companies seeking damages for widespread contamination of its waterways caused by Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), highly toxic and dangerous chemical compounds known to accumulate in the human body and cause serious health effects. Plaintiffs allege that Monsanto intentionally misled the public for decades about the environmental and health hazards of PCBs. Seeger Weiss, led by attorneys Matthew Pawa, Wesley Kelman, and MacKennan Graziano, serves as outside counsel for the City of Chicago in its lawsuit.
“This lawsuit is an important step towards shifting cleanup costs from Chicago and its residents to Monsanto and other companies responsible for selling the PCB products that continue to contaminate Chicago,” said Pawa. “Defendants promoted and sold these PCB products without warning anyone about what they knew or should have known about their enduring toxicity.”
Seeger Weiss has extensive experience representing state and local government entities in PCB contamination litigation. Our firm represented New Hampshire in its lawsuit against Monsanto, which settled in 2022 for $25 million. The firm currently represents the State of New Jersey, the City of Los Angeles, nine Illinois cities and villages on Lake Michigan, and the Burlington (Vermont) School District in PCB litigation against Monsanto.
Seeger Weiss’s environmental practice is led by partner Matthew Pawa, who pioneered the use of tort theories against polluters, including as a lead counsel in the groundbreaking climate change cases American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut and Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil. Over the last 25 years, our team has been involved in some of the country’s most important environmental cases, including New Hampshire’s lawsuit for statewide MTBE contamination, in which a jury awarded a $236M verdict against Exxon. This landmark case established important legal principles now used in cases nationwide against manufacturers of toxic chemicals. Today, Seeger Weiss represents Vermont and Maine in litigation against 3M and DuPont for pollution of the states’ land and water with the PFAS “forever chemicals” and numerous other states and public entities in PCB and other environmental contamination litigation.
Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future matter.