Our Safety & Health attorneys provide legal services to workplace environments governed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Workplace environments often targeted or cited for health and safety violations include settings such as factories, mines, quarries, construction sites, healthcare facilities, agribusiness processing sites and electric power generation plants.
We typically advise in the negotiation and settlement of OSHA and MSHA citations short of litigation. Because OSHA citations must be contested within 15 working days of receipt, our team of Safety & Health attorneys have developed a rapid response strategy to ensure that clients are able to decide whether to contest or settle citations quickly. We equip clients with all of the information needed to make time-sensitive decisions, whether during an investigation or following the receipt of citations. We can mobilize to any worksite in the country within 24 hours, and commonly do so after catastrophic events. We have successfully defended our clients throughout the country before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (and equivalent state tribunals) and the Mine Safety and Health Review Commission when litigation became necessary. Although many of our cases involve sizeable proposed penalties (including over 20 cases involving fatalities), we find cost-effective approaches to defending citations resulting in relatively small penalties.
Compliance counseling is an important part of our Safety & Health practice. Our counseling experience ranges from the complicated provisions of the process safety management standard for chemical manufacturing to bloodborne pathogen standards at healthcare facilities and safety procedures at construction sites. We provide management and supervisor training in safety and health regulations, record keeping, inspections and citation responses. Our attorneys have spoken on safety and health legal issues at regional and national conferences. In addition, we provide private seminars to some of our clients on OSHA and MSHA compliance and new developments in those administrations.
The scope of our Safety & Health practice includes:
- Compliance counseling relating to OSHA and MSHA
- Defense of citations, including those involving catastrophic events and fatalities
- Settlement of citations
- Supervisor training
- Defense of citations involving catastrophic events, including fatalities
- Defense of whistleblower claims
- Anonymous complaint responses
- Negotiation of site-specific safety rules
- Quashing of search warrants
- Defense of criminal charges