The law firm taking on Australia's biggest polluters
Equity Generation Lawyers has grown from one man and a laptop to one of the country's most prominent climate litigators, leading high profile cases against AGL and the Victorian government.
Four years ago, David Barnden was sitting alone in a library working on his first environmental case for his now well-established firm Equity Generation Lawyers — a dispute between Retail Employees Superannuation Trust and a 25-year-old member Mark McVeigh. The case eventually settled before going to trial, but it was the start of Barnden's foray into bringing a private law firm model to the environmental space.
Note: a transcript of this interview is available below. It has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Barnden, who had class action litigation experience from working at law firm Maurice Blackburn before moving to public interest legal group Environmental Justice Australia, told Capital Brief he recognised "a private law firm model could work in this space and could provide better services and potentially better outcomes than charities."
"There's a lot of charitable firms doing a really good job and I thought we could exist sort of in the space outside of those charitable organisations."
