Terris, Pravlik & Millian, LLP

Terris, Pravlik & Millian, LLP, is a public interest law firm with a practice in the areas of environmental, employment and civil rights law. A brief description of our firm's practice may be found on our firm's website: www.tpmlaw.com. The firm has 50 years of experience in federal environmental litigation on behalf of citizen-plaintiffs. Since 1970, we have litigated over 100 citizen suits under the federal environmental laws in Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.

Nearly all of the firm's work is done without charge to the client based on the hope that the client will prevail and attorneys' fees will be awarded by the court or will be received in settlement. When the firm does charge its clients, it charges below market rates to enable individuals who would otherwise not be able to afford legal representation to obtain it.

The courts have recognized the fact that our firm engages in a public interest practice. SPIRG v. AT&T Bell Laboratories, Inc., 842 F.2d 1436, 1445 (3d Cir. 1988) ("We rely on the findings of the district court as well as our own observation of the superb advocacy skills of plaintiffs' counsel, Mr. Terris, as evidence that Terris' billing rate for its clients falls far short of what the Terris firm could command in the marketplace"); ICO v. Honeywell International, Inc., 426 F.3d 694, 703 (3d Cir. 2005)("ICO was represented at trial by Terris, Pravlik & Millian ("the Terris firm" or "Terris"), a Washington, DC public-interest firm that specializes in complex environmental cases. * * * [N]o attorney in northern New Jersey would have been willing to handle this case without an immediate advance of out of pocket costs which, in this case, foreseeably amounted to over one million dollars. In this respect, the Terris firm is a 'rare bird'"); Salazar v. District of Columbia, 123 F. Supp. 2d 8, 12, 21 (D.D.C. 2000)("The Court has already ruled that Plaintiffs' attorneys have provided 'lawyering of the highest quality and professionalism. * * * There is no reason why Mr. Terris and Mr. Cunningham, both of whom have spent a lifetime in public interest law handling complex federal litigation, should not be compensated at the same rates as their equally skilled legal brethren who have chosen a different, albeit more lucrative, path to professional satisfaction. See Blum, 465 U.S. at 895; SOCM, 857 F.2d at 1524").