Pamela H. Schaefer is a shareholder with the firm's Litigation, Environmental and Real Estate Practices. Pam's clients include small business owners, such as gas station owners and dry cleaners, municipalities and private and publicly held corporations.

She is also highly experienced in the litigation of land use disputes, including cost recovery and contribution claims arising from environmental site remediation. In working with her clients, Pam focuses on strategies for cost management and creative use of land assets.

Pam draws on more than 20 years of experience, specializing in environmental problem solving.

As government and private business owners step up efforts to seek more "green" alternatives to existing energy resources and technology, Pam increasingly uses her background and creativity to find legal means to maximize tax incentives and other financial and environmentally friendly solutions for her clients. In the near future, "green solutions" will include carbon dioxide "cap and trade" assessments and trading. 

Representative Matters and Experience

• Representing a municipality in the State Umpire Process (Wisconsin Statutes section 292.35), enabling a municipality to recover remedial costs for cleaning up a contaminated landfill and using the funds to redevelop the site into a public park; resulting in an increase in private development in the surrounding area
• Achieving a highly creative solution for a gas station owner who purchased a previously cleaned-up site which subsequently contaminated adjacent drinking water wells. Pam's solution not only ensured DNR compliance, but also resulted in insurance recovery and a government grant to assist the client in paying for new off-site water supply wells
• On behalf of an industrial facility, ensuring the thorough investigation of the parameters of a contaminated site, in an effort to convince the City of Kenosha to acquire the site and redevelop it as a park with plans to redevelop the adjacent site for residential housing 

Accolades

• Wisconsin Top Rated Lawyer Martindale-Hubbell AV® Preeminent™ Peer Review Rated

 Affiliations/Memberships

• Milwaukee Bar Association
• State Bar of Wisconsin (Environmental Administrative and Litigation Sections)
• Wisconsin Green Building Alliance
• National Brownfields Association
• Milwaukee Urban Gardens (Board of Directors)
• Milwaukee Women's Environmental Professional Group
• Wisconsin Commercial Real Estate Women (WCREW)
• Waukesha County Economic Development Corporation (Ad hoc member of the Sustainability Committee)

Education

• J.D., University of Wisconsin Law School
• B.A., with distinction, University of Wisconsin-Madison