William G Beck

Career

Bill Beck has more than 35 years of experience as a trial lawyer. Bill’s national practice consists of trials, arbitrations, administrative proceedings, mediations and negotiations to resolve high stakes, technical, complex disputes involving environmental liability and insurance coverage.

Toxic Tort. Bill is particularly experienced in defending major toxic tort litigation, including both mass actions and class actions. His key wins include summary judgments and voluntary dismissals of a large group of high-profile, Erin Brockovich-created, hexavalent chromium exposure class actions, mass actions and individual suits; defense verdicts in a five-week groundwater jury trial and a complex odor trial; the nominal mass settlement of a 2,000-plaintiff groundwater and air case; and defeating class certification on pleadings alone. He reached and implemented some of the most challenging and controversial class settlements in recent times. Bill is presently defending numerous complex putative class actions, mass actions and individual toxic tort and odor nuisance cases in New York, South Carolina, Alabama, Illinois, Kansas and Missouri. Bill is comfortable and experienced cross-examining and developing experts in technical fields such as epidemiology, risk assessment, molecular biology and carcinogenesis, air dispersion modeling, groundwater modeling, geotechnical engineering and analytical chemistry.

Insurance Coverage. Bill has been lead counsel for plaintiffs prosecuting environmental insurance coverage and bad faith lawsuits and claims involving more than 450 sites and the laws of more than 40 states. Bill’s insurance coverage team has experience in insurance archaeology, policy analysis, charting, allocation, claim development, settlement negotiations, coverage litigation, and alternative coverage dispute resolution. Bill has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars from insurers.

PFAS. Bill has been lead trial counsel defending multi-thousand-plaintiff mass tort litigation seeking medical monitoring and alleging widespread property damage; class litigation seeking remedial action at several different kinds of manufacturing and waste receiving facilities, as well as money damages; a Riverkeeper’s citizen’s suit seeking to prevent PFAS use, receipt and discharge to surface water; and claims of property damage and increased disease risk by one the owners of one manufacturing facility against another. Bill and his team regularly counsel clients on PFAS regulatory compliance, remediation, reporting and litigation avoidance in numerous states with fast-evolving regulatory programs requiring creative and thoughtful compliance approaches to avoid loss.

Superfund. Bill has defended companies against major environmental liabilities for decades, including more than 80 federal and state Superfund sites in more than 25 states. Bill has special proficiency in operator allocation, transporter liability and allocation, municipal solid waste liability and allocation, successor liability, orphan share and natural resource damages issues.

Civil Rights. Bill helps lead a team representing people who have served decades of prison time for crimes they did not commit, seeking compensation for their civil rights claims, including a successful lawsuit for three exonerees in Mississippi and pending lawsuits for wrongfully convicted people in Louisiana and Kansas. Working with leading national civil rights firms and organizations since the 1990s, Bill and the team also help obtain multi-million-dollar recoveries for dozens of exonerees by reaching law enforcement liability insurance and other coverage, and in the process establishing cutting edge trigger of coverage theories as the law of several states.