How Historical Research Can Help Businesses Face Litigators and Regulators

Many of History Associates’ litigation research projects involve documenting historical contractual or regulatory relations between government and business. Often this work is related to particular legal disputes between our private sector clients and government officials or vice versa.

For other cases, government regulatory documents provide the most extensive and publicly accessible record of a company’s past actions related to the legal issues in dispute. Not only does this research supplement what is known from internal corporate files, but it allows our clients to know what other parties can learn from the public record.

On past projects, History Associates has used our understanding of government institutions and their documents to:

• compile site histories that document the extent and nature of federal government involvement in historical defense contracting activities. These site histories help many of our clients secure significant contributions from the federal government in environmental cost recovery actions;

• locate surviving copies of government contracts along with related correspondence and procurement policy documentation to substantiate claims of government liability for environmental costs, product liability, and toxic tort damages;

• collect the scattered record of complex negotiations over water and power rights during the 1930s to clarify the terms of an agreement at the center of a hundred-million dollar litigation;

• document the corporate succession of hundreds of companies through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to establish the viability of numerous potentially responsible parties in environmental cases; and

• trace the paper and money trail between historical contract obligations and their related congressional appropriations to determine if a means of funding a contract claim remains viable.

History Associates has also explored the government’s role (at the federal, state, and local levels) in such areas as occupational health, public health, environmental protection, facility licensing, product licensing, intellectual property, utility pricing and operation, labor relations, and land and water use.

Note: Although the confidential nature of our work precludes detailed descriptions of specific projects, we will be happy to provide relevant references upon request.