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News > Articles > Women In Business Achievement Awards
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Women In Business Achievement Awards
“He wasn’t handsome, but he was interesting,” said Marina Liacouras Phillips, an environmental lawyer with the law firm of Kaufman & Canoles, about her high school biology teacher who sparked her interest in the environment. “He was an inspiration to me.”
Walking through fields and streams on field trips, Phillips realized firsthand the impact that chemicals have on animals and people. “I decided then and there I wanted to go into pollution control,” she said.
The Valley Forge, Pa., native majored in biology at the University of Pennsylvania. As an intern at the Environmental Protection Agency during its heyday, she inspected the guts of frogs invaded by chemicals. Realizing upon graduation that she might make more of an impact as an attorney, she entered Villanova University’s law school.
Phillips spent three years as an assistant regulatory counsel with the EPA in the Philadelphia region, just when environmental law was emerging as a legitimate and powerful tool to regulate and penalize polluters.
It was the era of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, so she spent most of her time in streams, rivers and creeks, inspecting for sewage discharge. The job took her from the Delaware River to the Susquehanna River. She was working for the EPA when the Three Mile Island disaster occurred near Harrisburg.
Phillips joined Kaufman & Canoles in 1996, after having worked for Browning Ferris Industries in Houston; for ELF-Atochem, a division of Elf Aquitaine; as an attorney with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources; for the environmental consulting firm of Envirosphere, a division of Ebasco Services; and as an assistant attorney general of the state of Pennsylvania.
As a partner with the firm, she deals primarily with wetlands and water-related issues. She is one of two environmental lawyers with Kaufman & Canoles. The other attorney works in the Williamsburg office.
“The biggest challenge is balancing personal property rights with the environment,” she said. “They are both important interests.”
Phillips has seen aspects of environmental law from the government, corporate and now private practice side.
Her resume is impressive and peppered with accolades from her peers for her environmental law work, guiding clients through the bureaucratic maze of local, state and federal laws.
But it is her community work that really sets Phillips apart -- and she is proud of it.
She is an original member of the Elizabeth River Project and helped prepare the first Watershed Action Plan for the ERP in 1996. She also helped develop the River Stars program, which recognizes industries that work to improve water quality. She is a founding member of Lynnhave River 2007, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the river’s water quality, serving on its board of directors and chairing the governmental affairs committee.
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