Subjects:

Commercial Property, Environmental Law

Contents:

Tables summarising the key environmental liability regimes

A summary of the main environmental liabilities associated with property (e.g. contaminated land

asbestos

assumed liabilities

hazardous substances

licensing and permitting issues)

Pre-contract actions (e.g. when to carry out desktop searches and appointment/reliance issues for site investigations)

Allocating contaminated land liability where contamination is known/may be present/is unlikely to be present

Common drafting issues in the legal documentation (including agreements for sale, leases, pre-emption/option agreements, certificates of title)

Allocating environmental liabilities related to land being transferred in share sales (including warranty and indemnity drafting issues)

Post-completion issues (e.g commercially sensitive information)

Lender issues (e.g. lender liability and drafting issues in loan agreements)

Appendices (including overviews of the key environmental regimes, the CPSEs which relate to the environment and asbestos, standard enquiries of the Environment Agency, and a sample environmental report from a commercial search provider)

Commercial property practitioners are becoming increasingly aware of the impact and importance of environmental law on their practice. Environmental liabilities and issues now arise at every step of a commercial property transaction: when carrying out enquiries, negotiating the contract and other legal documentation, allocating liability and dealing with post-completion issues.

This practical and user-friendly guide sets out and provides advice about the most common environmental issues and corresponding risk management options that arise in commercial property transactions. It is an invaluable tool that the busy commercial property practitioner can refer to at each stage of the transaction.

Written by experts in the field, the guide is transaction-focused and arranged into separate buyer/tenant and seller/landlord sections for each chronological, transactional step. Importantly for practitioners, it includes some useful precedents and a set of drafting principles and pitfalls for the most commonly used documents, together with helpful tables and bullet-point checklists.