Amber leverages her experience with the Texas Attorney General to guide clients through federal, state, administrative, and appellate litigation.
At the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG), Amber was an Assistant Attorney General in the Environmental Protection Division, where she served as Managing Attorney of the Natural Resources and Environmental Defense Section. At OAG, she counseled Texas state agencies and state officials for critical, strategic, and high-profile decision-making regarding enforcement, permitting, rulemaking, cost recovery, and eminent domain. Amber litigated Texas’s interests in state and federal district courts and on appeal, where she defended and enforced Texas’s environmental regulatory decisions and challenged unfavorable federal rules and policies.
Highlights of Amber’s experience include:
- Representing the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and the Railroad Commission of Texas in a complex enforcement suit against individual, landowner, and several operating companies related to unauthorized discharges of industrial solid waste and oil and gas waste into a tributary of the Colorado River.
- Successfully representing TCEQ in suit for judicial review of enforcement order claiming misapplication and challenging TCEQ’s penalty policy.
- Successfully obtaining preliminary injunction of EPA’s “waters of the United States” rule and negotiated dismissal of the federal government’s appeal of the injunction.
- Representing the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in suit for purpresture and civil penalties related to a private entity building within a navigable stream.
- Representing TCEQ in a suit for judicial review of a water right permit issued to the Guadalupe Blanco River Authority.
- Successfully reversing district court judgment on appeal remanding a Railroad Commission order granting a saltwater injection well permit.
Before joining OAG, Amber was a staff attorney in the litigation division of TCEQ, where she advised on waste, water, and air enforcement cases in the oil & gas, chemical, waste management and recycling, real estate, retail, and public sectors. She also counseled the Office of Compliance and Enforcement on regulatory issues concerning air emissions, water rights and water quality, unauthorized water utilities, and recycling facilities.
Amber regularly speaks at Austin Bar Association events on oil and gas issues and has guest lectured for the University of Texas School of Law. She is also an active member of the Texas State Bar, currently serving as secretary on the Executive Committee of the Environmental & Natural Resources Law Section.
