Connie Sue Martin
Partner, Industry Group Leader
Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt PC
Connie Sue Martin helps Indian tribes and companies address
environmental contamination and restore injured natural resources.
She is one of the country’s most experienced practitioners of
environmental Native American law, with over 20 years of experience
representing tribes.
As outside counsel for tribes, she
reviews and evaluates tribal codes and has drafted tribal Superfund
ordinances and soil, sediment, groundwater, and surface water
cleanup standards, environmental enforcement manuals, civil
procedure and appellate procedure codes, enforcement of judgment
rules, tax codes, and corporation codes. She is also a litigator
with significant experience representing tribes in complex litigation
before federal and state courts, administrative agencies,
and arbitration.
Connie Sue’s
environmental practice focuses primarily on hazardous substance
contamination. Spills happen, and when they do, Connie Sue guides
clients through emergency spill response, investigations,
remediation, regulatory compliance and reporting, enforcement
actions, and citizen suits. She also helps clients to prevent or
reduce environmental liabilities through environmental due diligence,
contractual allocations of liability and negotiated or litigated
resolutions.
Connie Sue has significant technical and
policy training and experience. Early in her career, she completed
the Department of Interior’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment and
Restoration Training at the National Conservation Training Center,
a program for federal, state, and tribal trustee agency personnel
that is not open to the private sector. In addition, with the
National Tribal Environmental Council’s Superfund Working Group,
she helped develop policy guidance for the implementation of
CERCLA on Indian reservations. She is presently a member of the
Washington Department of Ecology’s Stakeholder and Tribal Advisory
Group (STAG) for the update to the Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA)
Cleanup Rule, an appointment that recognizes her expertise in
navigating the MTCA cleanup process.
Connie Sue has been recognized by U.S. News–Best Lawyers in America annually since 2010 for her expertise in environmental and natural resources law and litigation and Native American law. In 2015 and 2017, she was named the Native American Law Lawyer of the Year for Seattle.