Stoel Rives | Deeply Rooted Podcast S3E2: Forest Management, Endangered Species, and Regulatory Frameworks with Galen Schuler, General Counsel for Green Diamond Resources

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In the recent episode of the Stoel Rives Deeply Rooted Podcast, Galen Schuler, Vice President of Green Diamond Resources, delves into the intricate world of protected species within timberland environments. Partnering with Sarah Stauffer Curtiss from Stoel Rives, Schuler shares insights from his expansive career, exploring the ever-evolving landscape of regulations, litigation, and habitat conservation. Additionally, he unveils his personal favorite listed species, highlighting the symbiotic relationship between timberland operations and species conservation.

• Evolution of conservation practices over time.
• Importance of partnerships and collaboration in conservation.
• Regulatory challenges and their implications for forestry.
• Focus on the marbled murrelet HCP and its implications for Green Diamond.
• The transition and challenges of the Private Forest Accord HCP in Oregon.

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Episode Transcript

Here we are in a space of however many acres you’re trying to manage of timberland. You’re trying to produce wood fiber from market, and you’re trying to do it in a way that’s economically viable, and you also are trying to produce. I would say, superior, but at least adequate but I’d say we’re after superior biological outcomes for the species and ecosystems that are also there.

Sarah Stauffer Curtiss:
Welcome to the Stoel Rives Deeply Rooted podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Stauffer Curtis, a member of the Stoel Rives Environmental Land Use and Natural Resources practice group. This season, we’re interviewing respected industry leaders in the agribusiness, food, beverage and timber industries, and discussing how they and their companies are embracing innovation and capitalizing on new opportunities to move their industries forward in an ever-changing world. Subscribe at stoel.com that’s S-T-O-E-L.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. Greetings, listeners. Welcome to this episode of the Stoel Rives Deeply Rooted Podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Stauffer Curtis. My guest today is Galen Schuler, Vice President, General Counsel and corporate affairs at Green Diamond Resource Company. In this episode, Galen and I will discuss his role at Green Diamond, his experience working on protected species issues, and where he sees opportunities and risks for timberland owners when managing protective species compliance issues. Galen, welcome to Deeply Rooted. Thanks so much for being here today.

Gaelen Schuler:
Thank you for having me, it’s a privilege to speak to your listeners.

Curtiss:
So, I’d like to just start with you and a little bit about your story. If I remember correctly, you began your career in private practice before going in-house with Green Diamond.

Schuler:
That’s right. I started my legal career at actually a couple of large law firms in Seattle, based there, and that was pretty much emphasizing regulatory issues and litigation there. And then, after I made partner, I was invited to apply for a general counsel position at Green Diamond Resource Company, and that was back in 2004, and that was the beginning of my now 19th year at Green Diamond.

Curtiss:
Wow, 19 years. Thank you for that overview. One of the reasons that we wanted to interview you for today’s podcast is that you have a lot of experience with protected species issues in the timberland context and have developed a bit of a reputation as a thought leader on protected species issues. Can you tell me a little bit about your work on protected species issues?

Schuler:
My experience at Green Diamond, of course, includes all the implementation, development and implementation of plans and agreements. It also includes all the association work we do for other people’s plans and permits and compliance issues and listings. So, there’s been a lot of what I would call intervention litigation that is trying to get good public policy, commenting on public plans and programmatic plans and permits. There’s been some litigation defending our own permits, and then there’s all the implementation stuff, and I don’t know why… If I should take a deep breath now and tell you about all of the implementation if you’d like me to. I could kind of try to summarize it, but there’s a lot.

Curtiss:
Well, I think we’ll pause there. You know, I think one of the things we’re particularly interested in is talking about these voluntary conservation agreements that you’ve helped create for the company. And I guess where I’d like to go next is to ask you a bit about what you see as the most challenging aspect, or aspects of dealing with protected species when you’re working on these types of plans, particularly in the forest landscape.

Schuler:
Alright, well, of course it begins with… forget the law for a moment, it begins with operational and biological complexity. And here we are with a…in a space of however many acres you’re trying to manage of timberland, you’re trying to produce wood fiber from market and you’re trying to do it in a way that’s economically viable, and you also are trying to produce, I would say superior, but at least adequate, but I’d say we’re after superior biological outcomes for the species and ecosystems that are also there, and we’re trying to do it in the same space so there’s a lot of stewardship and knowledge and understanding that has to go along with trying to make both of those, or all of those things happen in that same space. It’s also a dynamic resource. So, it’s not just, you know, you build something, you have some impacts, you go offset it and you’re done. It’s going to evolve over time, both as the fiber you think you’re growing, and as the habitat you think you’re growing, and you’re trying to project that. And so, you have a lot of uncertainty and a lot of modeling you’re trying to do to see how all these things are going to work together or not. Then, some of the other complexities, you have a strong public interest in the resource you’re managing, even if it is a private resource. And I would say it also comes with a healthy amount of skepticism about whether or not you can actually achieve all of these objectives in that same space. And it would be, you know, interested public. But also, within agencies, the regulatory agencies, who I would say it’s fair to guess that a lot of the people who have dedicated their careers to those agencies are advocates for the resources they’re trying to protect and steward, and so they want you to prove to them that you know what you’re doing and so that’s part of the complexity. And then, there’s this idea that we are in a business that has a long-term investment horizon and we need assurances and stability, and a long-term perspective on conservation. And we’re doing that in an environment that sometimes, I would call, a regulatory immediacy or immediate results or sort of a reactive environment. And so, we’re trying to balance all that long term perspective and stability with also satisfying “I need it now and I need to know today that you’re in compliance and it’s going to be okay.” And then, of course, surrounding all that is the litigation, and the rigidity sometimes of multiple different regulatory frameworks that apply to the same space. Then, you have to get to agreement on the appropriate goals and objectives for that space you’re trying to manage, and a key issue here is trust. Are the people you’re working with actually trusting you and are you trusting them? Do you both have a meeting of the minds that you are after and believe you can get to an outcome that’s both good for the business on a voluntary conservation plan or agreement and for the resources you’re trying to protect. So, there’s gotta be trust on that. And then, there have to be some agency buy-in. So, the people that are working with you have to believe in voluntary conservation plans as a real good tool for conservation. And they have to be willing, and once convinced to be a champion for that because there’ll still be plenty of skeptics. I’m seeing this as federal ESA. But we also have some state ESA’s that we deal with and so same thing for say, California’s ESA, which has real teeth, and it has real permits, and the same thing there. You have to develop an effective partner, and when you get there, it’s a beautiful thing, and you know, over the years, over those 19 years, I feel like our relationship with California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife has grown to that place of trust where we’ll work together. And we were able to do that on the Safe Harbor agreement for Martin under the California ESA and started with the state and then that turned into a federal approval under a 4(D) rule. But whether it’s the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service nymphs or your state Fish Wildlife Agency, you have to get that buy-in on voluntary conservation programs and trust. And then, there’s the ESA Section 10 process. Which is, you know, you’ll find it in the HCP Handbook, just sort of overview of that. But it tries to integrate a lot of different requirements of federal law, and not just the ESA in a very complicated process. And you have to navigate all of that, and I guess part of it is experience helps you and the Agency’s experience. And I feel like the Fish and Wildlife Service has been working hard to improve that process, but there’s still many challenges in that process that I could give you some specific examples of, but we’ll wait. And I’ll stop there and let you continue with your questions.

Curtiss:
So, it’s safe to say there are multiple challenges when you’re dealing with these dynamic resources on the forest landscape, but you remain in the mix working with the wildlife agencies on these voluntary conservation agreements. What are the opportunities there? Where do you see opportunities for the company within this compliance space?

Schuler:
Yeah. One of the finest examples of where we see opportunity is complementarity between operations and conservation. Not everything we do is an adverse impact to a species. Not everything we do is bad for their habitat, and so finding, you can be finding encouragement, and in fact results in finding those places where your operations, your management style produces good results for habitat and for species outcomes. And they do exist, so I will put that at the top and I could give you lots of specific examples, but that’s one big category. They exist, and you should pursue those and find them.

Another one is, and this has been difficult because of the structure of the ESA and the way that listings come about and sort of the regulatory impacts come in serial fashion with each listing. But the Act and the Act, is set up to be implemented that way but it also says you should take an ecosystem approach. And an ecosystem approach would not be species by species. It would be by habitat type, or by ecosystem. And early in the ESA Section 10 program, back in the 90s, there were some multi, multi-species plans that actually were allowed to take that approach, and so they would identify a habitat type that would be conserved on the landscape, and then they would get species coverage that was based on gilding, or ecosystem for habitat types that cover lots of species. And so there were some plans that had well, 50 or more species covered, including one that Green Diamond has up from the year 2000, for its Washington Timberlands, 51 species. Plum Creek had the I-90 plan, which was even bigger in terms of the coverage, and those fell into disfavor because of the level of analysis required to cover every species in detail that was being included in the plan. And that’s unfortunate because we are now at a point where people try to do a few species in a plan, because that’s all the analytical capacity you can afford to do to get the plan approved. But if we could get back to an ecosystem approach, that is actually a more efficient way to do it and it’s really what the act is after. And I would say that the way the National Marine Fishery Service has approached it with the aquatic species, whether it’s the programmatic HCP’s in Washington or the one under development in Oregon, that is, you know, inherently as an ecosystem approach. So, it does work where you identify a bunch of aquatic species that would benefit from your focus on aquatic system conservation. And then you cover all of those. And we could do more of that with terrestrial. So, I would be encouraged by that.

And then one other thing, I’d say that over the years, it has a lot of appeal to me, and I’m glad we moved in this direction and that is, what I call the Safe Harbor Agreement approach, which is the net conservation benefits standard. And you folks that follow the ESA closely will know that Canada conservation agreements were for unlisted species, and Safe Harbor Agreements were for listed species. And they had different standards at first, but the Safe Harbor Agreement being only for listed species have been the standard that actually made sense. The Fish and Wildlife Service did go ahead and move CCAs over to the net conservation benefit standard so that’s progress. And now they’ve got new rules out that would allow Safe Harbor Agreements to apply to unlisted species, which also makes sense. And the reason why that makes so much sense, and it’s so appealing is because the Safe Harbor Agreements essentially make it possible, say, look, we’re going to just deal with where we are today and landowner, you make things better. And if you make the population expand, its range expand, or its habitat get better, you’re producing a conservation benefit and credit towards a net conservation benefit, and if landowners are not punished for making things better, that’s very attractive to make things better. So, the Safe Harbor Agreement tool, the net conservation benefit standard, using more of that, and making it available in more situations is a great idea.

Curtiss:
So, I think that’s a great segue to my next question. Given your experience working on habitat conservation plans and other voluntary compliance agreements under the Endangered Species Act, is there anything you would change about those programs to make them more attractive? You touched briefly on the proposed regulations, but I’d love to hear a bit more about what you think about those proposed regulations for improving efficiency and predictability and you know whether you see, you know, additional opportunities there.

Schuler:
Okay. Well, there are some good things in the proposed Section 10 regulations from the Fish and Wildlife Service, and they are picking up on some of the hurdles that have confounded applicants, and I think the Agency in the past. One of them is being very careful about defining the scope of the action when they’re approving a voluntary permit application. And they’re clarifying that what they are authorizing is the incidental take of a species. They’re not authorizing the underlying lawful land use that’s typically regulated by local government or state government. And what that does for them, and for everybody else is, it ties all of their process to the scope of their authority because they’re not authorizing things over which they have no authority. That should limit the inquiry, the decision-making process in terms of things like NEPA and also, the National Historic Preservation Act. And too often, and you know everybody...we can all be happy that we have a National Historic Preservation Act, and it has its purposes and its goals. But, bootstrapping the National Historic Preservation Act into making the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service into a cultural resource protection agency is not, I think, what anybody intended or Congress had in mind. And you can end up bogging the entire species conservation process down in trying to get the Fish and Wildlife Service to worry about cultural resources over which they have no authority. So, defining the scope of action is really important in that respect.

Moving the Safe Harbor concept over to unlisted species is another one that I mentioned that is also in those rules. One that that I don’t think is in the rules, but we’ve asked for and commented on is making it clear that when you do a Safe Harbor Agreement and you’re setting your baseline and this, I would say would probably be true for any analysis, in the context of the large landscape of resource management, your baseline has to be a landscape approach and not a habitat element approach. Let me give you an example. If you’re a rancher, and you want to do a Safe Harbor Agreement, the baseline has to be viewed as the landscape and your cycle of management. If you look at, and this will be an exaggeration, but if you look at the baseline from a blade of grass point of view, then saying that you can’t alter the baseline means, well, you can you can have a ranch in Safe Harbor Agreement, you just can’t do grazing. Well now, would that make any sense? Same for a forest environment. If the baseline is every tree that’s there today, then we’re out of business if the baseline is, you can’t alter the trees that are there. It has to be a landscape approach so it looks at how much can it be covered, or what age classes do you have across the landscape. And so far, I think that has been implicitly okay with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the other agencies that implement it, but if it could be clarified in rule, that would be helpful. Because there are still people who argue otherwise, and it needs to be cleared up.

The NEPA reform, some of which that actually made their way in lately through the Deficit Reduction Act. Great, you know, timelines and one that I think has been…and we’re going to be trying this out, I think it’s really helpful to have both in the Section 10 program and in NEPA that the reasonable range of alternatives doesn’t include things that are technically and economically infeasible. Why would you do an in-depth analysis? An analysis in detail, an alternative that a business would never undertake because it can’t afford to do it, and never would do it. That’s a waste of everybody’s time to analyze that alternative in detail. So I’m glad to see improvements like that.

One of my other favorite axes to grind...I’ll put it under the maximum extent practicable standard for (this is for HCP’s and Incidental Take Permits), but it’s a principle that I think is important across all mitigation. And that is, I know there’s a valid reason why agencies don’t want you to stack mitigation or take credit for something that’s already been used. So for example, if Green Diamond sells a conservation easement to an insurance company that needs to offset some natural resource damages to marbled murrelets and now we’ve created a set aside stand for marbled murrelets, and we’ve been paid for that, and it’s being managed from our marbled murrelets, we can’t turn around and take credit for that conservation easement in an HCP. That makes perfect sense. On the other hand, if we’ve been for 30 years, setting aside a bunch of habitat to protect the Northern Spotted Owl, and we’ve been recruiting older trees and stands for the spotted owl, and now we need to do a marbled murrelet HCP because all this retention is giving us more and more protected habitat for the marbled murrelet, and we say well, we want credit for all this retention we’ve been doing, and the fact that we’re going to continue to do it across the landscape, and we want that credit as a habitat benefit for another species that we’ve never previously addressed in an HCP, the murrelet, that should be okay. It would not make sense to say otherwise. Because, what you would do is punish those who have done the most, and the early actors, and tell them the more you’ve done, the more you impinge on your capacity conserve, the more we will expect of you. And that’s where this interpretation of the maximum extent practicable has to take into consideration the cumulative effects of regulations, and allow…there’s legitimate stacking, and that is, and it’s back to the scope of the action. If you’ve already had in Incidental Take Permitting for one species, but not for another, and under an ecosystem approach, what you’ve been doing for one species benefits other species, and you want to formally address them in a conservation plan, you should be able to talk about the things you’re already doing that are going to continue to benefit these other species and get credit for it. So, we’ll put that under maximum extent practicable, but it’s a commonsense ecosystem approach to mitigation.

And then I would say, and this is outside the voluntary permit space mostly, but I would say that the ESA would benefit from less litigation. I don’t think the Fish and Wildlife Service is benefiting from all the litigation. I don’t think that most of the constituents of the Fish and Wildlife Service are benefiting from it. And I guess that would have to take an act of Congress, but I think citizen suits maybe should just be limited to Section 9, and all the stuff that’s in mastery of procedures Act, Section 4710 Agency actions, should not be citizen suit items. And we could have a little less uncoordinated hijacking of the federal agency and its resources by separate judicial decisions sprinkled across our country.

Curtiss:
So, I want to circle back briefly to some of the comments you made on mitigation. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently issued updated mitigation and compensatory mitigation policies. Do you see anything promising in that new guidance?

Schuler:
So, I did have a chance to review that new mitigation policy and I thought…my impression is that it was an improvement on past approaches and the improvement is that essentially the Fish and Wildlife Service, with rigor, has given itself lots of discretion to use common sense, and it kind of gets back at what I just was going on about with the maximum extent practicable issue. If you…if an applicant is doing something good for the species, producing a net conservation benefit, making a long-term commitment that’s going to build the ecosystem elements that you need for multiple species, making a positive contribution to recovery, and whatever your plan or agreement is, is going to secure that, and a high probability of success for the covered species and its habitat, it shouldn’t be a mitigation policy that says, well, that’s all really good except I need a three to one ratio of acres. So, it’s really qualitative and outcome based instead of a sort of a rigid ratios sort of approach and I think that’s really a good idea.

Curtiss:
So, I want to shift gears here and talk a bit about process and procedure. I know that for many of our clients, a voluntary compliance option like a Habitat Conservation Plan or a Safe Harbor Agreement might be appealing, but it takes the services so long to review the pros plan and process the permit that it is not practical for the business. Have you had similar experiences with lengthy timelines? I think I know the answer to that question. And a follow up to that is, is there anything you’ve done on your projects that has helped move the permitting and environmental review processes along?

Schuler:
Yes, we’ve had those experiences. When I first came to Green Diamond, and we didn’t go into all the plans and permits, but one of the first things I was supposed to do was push the, what we call the Aquatic HCP in California across the finish line. And so, I arrived, you know at the end 2004 and it was finally done in 2007 but was started 10 years before that. And so that, I think, is probably too long and the reason why it took so long, and there are several reasons, but a common element, because the Forest HCP, which we started shortly after that, also took about 10 years to get done. The common elements that are frustrations in that process, so, some of these, I would say, are not something that the permittee can help, so, it’s a little bit of an Agency thing here I have to talk about, but it’s really important. One is at the outset the Agency working with really does have to have buy in…the people that are working on it, the team, have to have buy-in on the Section 10 program. If you assign people to the plans and to the work who actually don’t believe in Section 10 and don’t think it’s a good part of the ESA, and are sort of…would like to second guess all of the years of prior work that were done by their colleagues who negotiated and helped to develop an HCP, and they would like to start over on the negotiation, ask a couple hundred questions on the record that have to be re-asked and answered or want to draft a jeopardy opinion on the HCP that their colleagues have negotiated, that will slow you down. And so, you can’t have that sort of thing, that sort of no buy-in fundamentally. You have to have a champion and you have to have a team from the Agency that can stick together long enough, especially for key personnel, to give you a window to get through the development and approval. And you know right now, I feel like we have that by the way, on the HCP we’re working on. I’m very grateful for it. And some of this stuff is beyond the control of the Agency. People retire. People die. Of course, the longer it takes, the more likely you actually expose yourself to…people could end their career. People will get reassigned. And then, the Fish and Wildlife Service, I don’t know how it works necessarily in the other agencies, but they do a lot of…it’s part of their career ladder, they do a lot of detailing. And so somebody that is detailed to…or somebody that’s working with you in the field office suddenly gets detailed and they’ll disappear for a few months and that can be disruptive too. Now, if they have a deep bench or they have a lot of people that are bought into the what the team is working on, then that’s easier to handle that. But sometimes you lose key people for a while and it’s slows you down. So, those are on the Agency side.

And then, so what should an applicant do? Well, you work closely with your field office to try to keep the team together. You identify the windows when they come together and you need to be prepared to move on that window of opportunity when you’ve developed an understanding and a relationship and you’ve got people briefed on what you’re trying to accomplish, and you’re negotiating through and you’re drafting that HCP and getting in front of people. And so, the best thing I could say about that is a permittee applicant should be prepared to serve sequester or focus the people. And this is difficult, because people have other jobs to do. And so, with our biological staff, you know, they’ve got a lot of operational responsibilities. When we asked them to hunker down and try and get through the development of an HCP, it’s really hard to do. And that’s what you gotta do. And I remember back in the day, Palm Creek, when they did their native fish HCP that’s in Montana, a guy named Mike Jostrom, for a year or two, his only job was get that done. And so, being able to focus was…that was a good idea.

Curtiss:
That’s a great recommendation. So what’s on the horizon? I mean, I’m not asking you to disclose any proprietary information, but are there any protected species hot topics that you’re focused on in 2023?

Schuler:
Well, there I think we’ve already commented. So we’ll be curious to see how the Fish and Wildlife Service Section 10 rules turn out, and so we’ll be watching that. There are specifically for Green Diamond, we’re working on a marbled murrelet HCP. The explanation of that as we’ve been doing no take and that has worked for a long, long time just to, you know, informal no take policy in consultation with the state and federal agencies that we’ve done so much retention for other species over the years that it has become more and more difficult to to rely on a no take approach, so we’ve moved over to working on an HCP.

And I would say in parallel in Washington state, a lot of the landowners who have been doing forest and fish since well released, effectively since the year 2000, they also are pursuing Safe Harbor Agreements for the marbled murrelet and sort of a programmatic template approach because they’ve been doing a lot of retention but now it’s beginning to look like we’ll grow into murrelet habitats a little bit, so that’s in Washington.

Then, of course, there’s the implementation of the Private Forest Accord HCP in Oregon. So that’s a hot topic to go from the statute now into a federal programmatic permit plan. And then from a Green Diamond perspective again, since we’re on the east side and we know that the Private Forest Accord would be mostly designed for I mean there are Anadromous fish everywhere in the aquatic species everywhere but from a business perspective, it’s mostly designed to for sort of a high productivity forest on the western side of the state. We’re wanting to find some flexibility in the Private Forest Accord for what we have, which is mostly a forest rehab project in Central Oregon, South Central Oregon, and so we’ve been working on some Safe Harbor Agreements that would focus on the best Anadromous bull trout fish resources we have. If we just do the Private Forest Accord straight up we have a lot of a lot of roads and a lot of land and a lot of it has nothing to do with Protected Fish Species, and if we have to spend all of our resources on that landscape instead of on the key resources, that would be a mismatch, so we’ll be looking for that.

And then we have familiar issues, you know, Fisher has been relitigated; will be up for another status potentially based on a potential settlement of litigation. Expect retrievals in Oregon and elsewhere to come back around for a status review. We’ve got candidate species, the foothills yellow legged frog and the western pond turtle that are under review. Pollinators are a hot topic and experimental populations being reintroduced in the forest environment, the Condor, northern California and probably the grizzly in the North Cascades. So those are, there’s always a bunch of interesting stuff going on.

Curtiss:
Yeah, just a few things in the protected species space right now.

Schuler:
Yeah.

Curtiss:
So before we go I have to ask, what’s your favorite listed species Act?

Schuler:
Thank you for asking. I think it is the Humboldt Marten. The Humboldt Marten is a little, let’s see, it would be either a big weasel or a little fisher depending on which end of the spectrum we want to approach it from. It’s very cute, very charismatic, feisty and cute. But what I really love about it is it is the ultimate myth buster. Early scientific literature on the Humboldt Marten is another, it’s another old growth obligate, it needed to be in large, stands of old growth with a lot of what they call ericaceous shrubbery beneath them. And, the more we looked for Martens the more we learn about them, the more we find that their habitat needs are pretty doggone flexible. Like they’re not just in old growth, they’re in like really rocky places with hardly any trees called Serpentine soilers. They’re on the beach in Oregon in the beach pines. And so they seem to be a lot more flexible in terms of their habitat needs than we first assumed. And the other thing that was assumed well, a couple more understandings that seem to be being blown apart is that there was an early paper that said that the fisher, which is another westoood, the Fisher sweet is the Marten sour because they thought they were competitive for the same space. But, in fact, we’re finding them living in the same space. And another myth that’s really important is that they can’t live in a managed forest landscape. And we’re finding them on Green Diamond and they seem to be spreading on us and they seem to be reproducing in a managed landscape that was pretty intensely managed not so long ago. And so I love the Marten for all that. It points towards the the opportunity for complementarity that I was talking about and in fact sometimes operations can produce habitat for these species, and I think we’re in that space.

Curtiss:
Galen, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today and for sharing your story with our listeners. It has been great talking with you.

Schuler:
Thanks for the opportunity.

Curtiss:
Thank you for listening to the Stoel Rives Deeply Rooted podcast to follow along and get additional insights from each episode, visit Stoel.com. Please also take a moment to rate and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and may not reflect the views of Stoel Rives LLP. Participation in this podcast by any individual is not an endorsement of any view or opinion expressed. This is not legal advice and the podcast does not create an attorney-client relationship.

About Stoel Rives | Deeply Rooted Podcast

This season, our hosts are interviewing respected industry leaders and discussing how they, and their companies, are embracing innovation and capitalizing on new opportunities to move their industries forward in an ever-changing world. The first three episodes will be hosted by Claire Mitchell, Merissa Moeller and Kristin Russell of Stoel Rives’ agribusiness, food, beverage and timber industry group.

The views expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and may not reflect the views of Stoel Rives LLP. Participation in this podcast by any individual is not an endorsement of any view or opinion expressed.

This is not legal advice and the podcast doesn't create an attorney-client relationship.

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