There’s money in them thar melting ice caps.
Sullivan & Worcester is the latest law firm to announce the formation of a full-time climate-change group to advise companies on issues related to global warming.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map 
Led by Washington, D.C.-based partners, Jeffrey M. Karp and Jerome C. Muys, the group is advertising expertise in carbon-offset credits, negotiating long-term power agreements, introducing and marketing green, energy-efficiency and conservation products and addressing sustainable-building initiatives.
The move is hardly novel: Twenty of the 100 highest-grossing U.S. law firms have established practices advising companies on climate-change issues, according to a January survey by Bloomberg News. The attorneys help clients finance clean-energy projects and lobby Congress, typically billing $500 to $700 an hour.
“Change creates opportunities,” said Seth Kaplan, vice president for climate advocacy for New England-based Conservation Law Foundation. “Not to be too cynical about it, but if we are going to harness the power of the economy and the market to attack this most important problem facing the world today, then we need the tools we have for dealing with markets and systems. And that’s what private-sector lawyers do.”
Joel Henning, senior vice president for Hildebrandt International, the largest law firm management consultant in the world, has seen such boom-and-bust cycles with other cutting-edge fields like nanotechnology and securitization, which involved pooling and repackaging of cash-flow producing financial assets into securities that were then sold to investors -innovations that helped spur the subprime crisis.
“It is obviously the flavor of the month,” Henning said of the climate-change practice area. “Law firms typically attempt to get ahead of these trends which they believe might result in new practices.”
Such pitches are only expected to accelerate against the backdrop of Congressional deliberations about mandating programs to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and the likelihood that the next president will take a pro-active approach.
All three prospective presidential candidates have expressed support for so-called “cap and trade” policies which use markets to provide financial incentives to reduce emissions, Kaplan said.
Among those firms advertising the new expertise are Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, Heller Ehrman and Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal (which wooed more than a dozen lawyers with energy expertise from Sullivan & Worcester – and its clients – last month).
Baker & McKenzie, a Chicago-based firm with 3,335 lawyers, was a pioneer in the field, creating a climate-change group in the late 1990s. The 60-lawyer team brought in estimated revenue of $15 million to $20 million last year, according to Richard Saines, who heads the U.S. part of the practice.
“We saw this as one of the key international-law issues that would affect U.S.-based multinationals,” Saines told Bloomberg. “And that is now the case.”
Henning said the voluntary trade of carbon emission credits is already a multibillion-dollar-a-year business. “A huge contingent of the biggest companies are already participating. And the law firms representing those guys have a leg up.”
Amid such exuberance, he cautions firms against marketing new practice areas before they have any real expertise. “My concern with these cutting-edge practice areas is that you have to be able to come up with the goods.”
But Kaplan said that there are huge opportunities for those with the skills to guide and oversee systems that will reduce emissions.
“What is desperately needed is the legal infrastructure to create and administer these new markets and these [carbon emission] reductions,” he said.
“Actually reducing emissions in the manner that scientists tell us we need to reduce them will require a complete transformation of our economy and of our society. Any time you do that, you create opportunities to create businesses. And lawyers are part of that story.”