Eelaw

Managing Partners: Paulina Riquelme Pallamar
Number of partners: 1
Number of other lawyers: 17

Firm Overview:
Eelaw is a highly specialist environment, energy and natural resources law firm. With extensive and proven experience in the legal analysis required for the development and implementation of projects, proceedings before the public authority, and the study of environmental regulations. The firm is up to date and offers a pioneer service of advanced legal services on several issues regarding the sustainable exploitation of natural resources.

Eelaw believes in the full compatibility between economic activity and the sustainable development of the country, assisting its clients in finding ways that allow them to fully meet their objectives, while at the same time fully respecting the rules in force and generating positive links with their surroundings and their communities.

Eelaw has received national and international recognitions, featured in international publications for the performance and work ethics of its legal team and outstanding results achieved for its clients.

At Eelaw, the attorneys view all challenges as opportunities; they apply a flexible analysis, with emphasis on innovation and a personalised approach, enabling the firm to respond to each client individually, adjusting to their specific needs. Eelaw goes further, taking as reference not only the national law but also the development of international environmental practices, allowing the firm to bring to Chile the most advanced perspectives in the region and the world.

Main Areas of Practice: 

• Project development and permitting: Eelaw provides legal advice to companies and associations of different productive sectors with the focus of offering strategic regulatory and technical-environmental point of views. Eelaw lawyers are specialists in the elaboration of strategies for designing and undertaking the environmental impact assessment of projects, permits management and the successful implementation of projects during their life cycle stages: construction, operation and closure.
• Environmental Compliance: Eelaw counseling in matters of environmental compliance allows the firm to deliver a strategic analysis to the work of consultants and in-house professionals, aiming at identify gaps, anticipating and preventing regulatory non-compliance scenarios, seeking that the client may understand and adapt to regulatory changes and encouraging adoption of corrective actions to address compliance gaps. Eelaw educates and train the clients, their managers, technicians and professionals, in an effort to promote a culture of environmental compliance.
• Environmental impact assessment and Water Resources: Eelaw provides legal support in the various actions before the Environmental Assessment Service (SEA), accompanying the client in the process of processing their project before the Environmental Impact Assessment System (SEIA), from its entry, until obtaining the resolution of environmental qualification, including the possible recursive stages either before the Administrative Authority, Environmental Courts or Courts of Justice. Eelaw is aware of the new regulatory developments related to the management of water resources and advises on all processes that involve the exploitation or affectation of resources water, especially the reform of the Water Code.
• Regulations: monitoring, development and trends: Eelaw actively participates in the development of new environmental regulations. The firm has advised state agencies and private actors in the design and implementation of public policies in environmental matters and actively participates in the creation of proposals and regulatory projects. In this sense, Eelaw provides legal advice on environmental regulatory issues to industry associations such as the National Mining Society (SONAMI).
• Circular Economy / Climate Change / Pollution Control: Eelaw advise the clients in the compliance with the associated regulations, their report to the authority, as well as in the regulatory framework applicable to the remediation of contaminated components. In this way, the firm provides pioneering environmental advice in the country, not only focusing on compliance, but also on supporting the clients in their efforts to raise their environmental standards. On the other hand, the firm actively participates in the discussion of international environmental regulations, as is the case with the Minamata Convention, for which the firm has highly qualified lawyers.
• Environmental Litigation: Eelaw focuses on supporting and defending its clients in environmental and sectoral sanctioning proceedings, particularly before the Superintendency of the Environment, where the firm advised on the filing of the first Compliance Programme in Chile. Likewise, the attorneys also have experience in handling cases and litigating before the environmental courts, courts of appeal and the Supreme Court.

www.eelaw.cl