Environmental Liabilities & Remediation Actions

Environmental Liabilities & Remediation Actions

In real estate sales and purchases, it is important to allocate liability for soil and groundwater contamination.

Brownfield remediation is a key aspect of the redevelopment of old industrial sites. Let us help you find the best solutions to the environmental liability and remediation issues you may encounter in your business.

While the main rule is that the liability for restoring environmental contamination rests with the party that caused the contamination, it may be contractually hard to allocate the liability to that party or the responsible party may not be known. The contamination could also have be caused by activities that used to be legal or the responsible party could be insolvent. Our team has a broad experience of remediating and/or redeveloping brownfield properties and can provide you with effective counsel on the risks and challenges associated with the redevelopment and with the sale or purchase of such sites.

Our clients include municipalities, listed and other large companies, ministries, state-owned companies, government agencies, lenders and international law firms.

  • Negotiation of sale and purchase agreements
  • Applications for remediation permits and administrative compulsion processes
  • Legal environmental due diligence reviews
  • Liability-related disputes and settlement negotiations
  • Legal investigations of contamination, i.e. determining who is the polluter.

Latest references

We advised DNB Bank ASA in its agreement with Fennia Mutual Insurance Company on the development and lease of the premises at Fabianinkatu 8, Helsinki. With the lease agreement, DNB Bank ASA will focus all its Finnish operations at the Fabian 8 office. The other tenants at the renewed premises will be DNB Carnegie Investment Bank AB’s Finnish operations and DNB Auto Finance Oy. In connection with the long-term lease agreement, the parties also agreed on a major renovation project to completely refurbish the premises. The object of lease will be completed in the second half of 2027.
Case published 10.10.2025
We advised Yellow Film Studios, the largest independent film and television production company in the Nordics, in its strategic merger with Danish film industry sales and financing studio REinvent Studios. Together they form Reinvent Yellow, a unified hub for television and film production, sales, financing and innovation, combining over three decades of production experience and a vast catalogue of titles.
Case published 8.10.2025
We successfully represented a panel of reinsurance companies in an international ad hoc arbitration. The dispute arose out of a reinsurance treaty under the terms of which the reinsurers had reinsured a portfolio of risks underwritten by the cedent. The parties disagreed as to whether the reinsurance provided coverage for a certain loss that had occurred because of the market turmoil caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The case involved highly complex legal and contractual questions requiring special expertise on reinsurance law and practice. The arbitral tribunal rejected the counterparty’s claims for reinsurance compensation against our clients in full. The amount in dispute was approximately EUR 34 million.
Case published 16.9.2025
We supported byFounders.vc as the Finnish counsel in their investment in DataCrunch Oy in a USD 64 million Series A funding round. DataCrunch provides scalable AI compute solutions from energy-efficient data centers in Iceland and Finland. byFounders.vc is the community-powered early-stage venture fund investing in globally ambitious teams connected to the Nordic and Baltic countries.
Case published 11.9.2025