Leader of the Environmental Litigation Group (ELG) at Baron & Budd. ELG was started by Mr. Summy in 2002 and is comprised of 30 attorneys and support professionals who concentrate in large environmental litigation across the country. In 2020, Law360 recognized ELG as one of its highly prestigious Practice Groups of the Year awards for the United States in the category of Environmental Law.
Mr. Summy has served both in court-appointed leadership positions and directly represented clients in some of the country's largest environmental cases with national significance. It all began with a single phone call in August 1995 when Mr. Summy was a new lawyer. He received a call from a prospective client in North Carolina who had learned that he and his neighbors had been ingesting the chemical MTBE in their drinking water wells for years. Mr. Summy took the case, and after years of fighting for the residents' rights and going to trial, the case resulted in a record settlement.
Mr. Summy soon learned that MTBE was contaminating drinking water wells all over America. That case proved to be only the first of many to come. Mr. Summy was hired by public water providers all over the country whose residents had contaminated wells. He became the “œgo to” lawyer for public entities facing environmental contamination which impacted their public resources. Mr. Summy has represented public entities from the east coast to the west coast and all across middle America. He and his ELG Team have recovered billions of dollars on behalf of their clients in environmental litigation.
