In this episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, host Russel Treat interviews Vince Murchison of the Murchison Law Firm to discuss the significant role of attorneys in pipeline safety.

Vince shares his career journey, insights into pipeline legal work, and the complexities of regulatory compliance and enforcement processes in the pipeline industry.

The conversation also touches on stakeholder engagement, the adjudication process, and the importance of clear, persuasive communication in the legal and regulatory contexts.

Role of the Attorney in Pipeline Safety Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Vince Murchison is a member at the Murchison Law Firm. Connect with Vince on LinkedIn.
  • Murchison Law Firm, PLLC possesses expertise in the pipeline industry, covering regulatory matters, project development, operations and maintenance, risk assessment, and integrity management. With extensive experience in enforcement procedures, administrative processes, pleadings, hearings, and informal resolutions, Murchison Law has successfully contested agency findings and achieved unprecedented voluntary resolutions, including appealing agency findings and penalties.
• Upstream: Refers to the initial stages of exploration and production in the oil and gas industry, such as locating and extracting crude oil and natural gas.
• Downstream: Pertains to the latter stages of the oil and gas industry, including refining, marketing, and distribution of finished products.
• Compressor Station: A facility located along a natural gas pipeline that helps move the gas through the pipeline by increasing its pressure.
• Flow Rate: The volume of fluid that moves through a pipeline per unit of time, typically measured in barrels per day (bpd) or cubic meters per second (m³/s).
• Pressure Drop: The reduction in pressure as fluid flows through a pipeline, often due to friction and other resistances.
• Pigging: The practice of using devices called pigs to perform various maintenance operations inside pipelines, such as cleaning and inspecting.
• Metering Station: A facility that measures the flow and volume of oil or gas passing through a pipeline to ensure accurate tracking and billing.
• Integrity Management: Processes and practices used to ensure that pipelines are operated safely and reliably, minimizing risks of leaks or failures.
• SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) is a system of software and technology that allows pipeliners to control processes locally or at remote locations.
• Corrosion Control: Techniques and methods used to prevent or mitigate the corrosion of pipelines, including coatings and cathodic protection.
• Right of Way (ROW): A legal right to pass through property owned by another, often used in the context of laying and maintaining pipelines.
• Hydrostatic Testing: A method of testing pipeline integrity by filling the pipeline with water and pressurizing it to check for leaks and strength.
• Leak Detection: Technologies and methods used to identify leaks in a pipeline, including sensors, pressure monitoring, and acoustic systems.
• Pump Station: A facility in a pipeline system that uses pumps to move liquids through the pipeline by increasing the fluid’s pressure.
• Trunk Line: A major pipeline that transports oil or gas from production areas to refineries or distribution points.
• Gathering System: A network of small pipelines that collect oil or gas from production sites and transport it to a central location for further processing or transport.
• PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) is responsible for providing pipeline safety oversight through regulatory rulemaking, NTSB recommendations, and other important functions to protect people and the environment through the safe transportation of energy and other hazardous materials.
• FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) regulates, monitors, and investigates electricity, natural gas, hydropower, oil matters, natural gas pipelines, LNG terminals, hydroelectric dams, electric transmission, energy markets, and pricing.
• API (American Petroleum Institute) represents all segments of America’s natural gas and oil industry. API has developed more than 700 standards to enhance operational and environmental safety, efficiency, and sustainability.
  • API RP 1185 aims to use the Pipeline SMS framework to build on stakeholder engagement to support more community involvement and dialogue.
• The Clean Water Act (CWA) is the principle law governing pollution control and water quality of the Nation’s waterways. The object of the CWA is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.
• Consent Decree: A legal agreement approved by a judge, often used to resolve disputes between regulatory agencies and companies. In the context of pipelines, a consent decree may outline specific actions a company must take to comply with regulations and remediate any violations.
• EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is an independent organization within the federal U.S. government designed to take measures to protect people and the environment.

Role of the Attorney in Pipeline Safety Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” Episode 345, sponsored by Solarcraft, providing high-quality engineered solutions for powering, sheltering, and operating critical field automation infrastructure. Find out more about Solarcraft at solarcraft.net.

[background music]

Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Baba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. Now, your host, Russel Treat.

Russel: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time, and to show that appreciation, we give away a customized Yeti tumbler to one listener every episode. This week our winner is Jessica Andre with Kinder Morgan.

To learn how you can win this prize, stick around till the end of the episode. This week, we’re going to speak with Vince Murchison of the Murchison Law Firm and talk about the role of the attorney in pipeline safety. Vince Murchison, welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Vince Murchison: Thank you, Russel. It’s about time you had me on the show.

Russel: [laughs] That’s exactly the response I’d expect from you, man. That’s exactly the response I’d expect.

Vince: I appreciate that we’ve had the time to do this.

Russel: I’m glad to have you on. If you would, why don’t you just give us a brief introduction? Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Vince: I’m the head cook and chief bottle washer at the Murchison Law firm. We have three lawyers here, and a paralegal, and a law clerk, and we do exclusively pipeline work. What else can I tell you about it?

Russel: Maybe you could tell us the journey of how you went from…how you decided to become an attorney, and how that occurred, and how did you become a pipeline attorney.

One of the things that a lot of people don’t understand about attorneys and really a lot of other professionals is there’s a lot of specializations. There’s generalists as well, but being a pipeline attorney, that’s a rather narrow, vertical specialization for an attorney. Maybe you could tell us what that journey was.

Vince: When I was an undergrad in junior college, I found a discarded copy of The Texas Penal Code in the stairwell and took it home, started reading it, and became interested. I thought that’s something I might want to do. I had met a few lawyers through my dad’s work.

Once I got to Texas A&M, I wised up that I probably needed to make a living after I got out of there, so I went to the accounting and finance side. After I came out of there, I worked for a damages litigation consulting firm. That allowed me to work with lawyers day in and day out.

Despite that experience, I chose to go to law school. I went to the University of Texas, graduated in 1991. Are you still there? Began practicing in 1992. Began as an environmental lawyer, but the firm I was with began to offload all of the people in the environmental group. So I went over to the upstream side, exploration and production.

One day, a fella walked in my office and said, “Let’s do some right-of-way due diligence on this pipeline project.” I remember thinking that that’s got to be a simple project to accomplish.

Russel: [laughs]

Vince: Seemingly simple, right?

Russel: Right.

Vince: That led me to become very central to the Longhorn pipeline project. We started that in 1995. It rapidly, rapidly devolved into a lot of litigation, National Environmental Policy Act litigation. We had to do a lot of writing. We had to do a lot of technical analyses to accomplish what we were trying to do, was to get an environmental assessment.

Longhorn did not have a lot of people, so I became the right-hand man to the VP of Operations, O.B. Harris, and then evolved into the guy who managed all the documentation that went to the lead agencies.

I had a stable of experts. Had the good fortune of working with some very good engineers who had been at Williams and then ended up at Magellan, which was the operator of Longhorn. They taught me a tremendous amount about the technical side of pipelining because I had to be able to write about that in the context of the environmental assessment.

That was not only with the lead agencies but also with the opponents, the City of Austin and the Lower Colorado River Authority, along with just public-facing documents that we had to put out. It was a very, very controversial project. Every day was a roller coaster ride.

After that, I started talking to people. I had another good experience that got me involved in the industry, and that was being asked to join the Performance Excellence Team, which is a joint committee of the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association and the American Petroleum Institute.

I’ve been doing that for 22 years now. I finally decided in about 2008, I wanted to focus on pipeline work. I sure liked it a lot more than I did the upstream exploration and production. I began to focus my practice there, and the work cases started coming in.

I finally became disillusioned, if you will, with big law after 20 years, and so that’s when I started the Murchison Law Firm with the goal and objective of doing everything pipeline except for rate making. We don’t touch that, the [inaudible 6:21] side of things, but everything else in the pipeline world, we can do.

Russel: It’s a really interesting story. For the listeners, Vince and I had been working together on a project for about seven years. I’m not going to talk about the details of that project, but I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with him.

Because of my career and what I’ve done, I’ve worked with a lot of attorneys over the years. I will tell you that Vince can go toe to toe in the pipeline space with a lot of technical guys much more so than you might expect, like way more so than you’d expect from a typical attorney. It’s pretty impressive. You certainly have bared down on gaining that knowledge and that focus.

The other thing that’s interesting is you went to Texas A&M for your undergraduate, and then you went to University of Texas for your law degree. I have a completely unrelated question, but when the Texas, Texas A&M football game happens this coming November, are you going to be wearing a suit that’s half maroon and half orange, or how’s that going to work?

Vince: Russell, you know better than that. There’s no way that’s going to happen. A group of friends from A&M started the Aggie Law Student Society at the Texas School of Law, so we made our presence known. I like to say that I tried my very, very best to up the standards over there and failed miserably.

Russel: [laughs]

Vince: I say that tongue in cheek.

Russel: That’s awesome. Let’s talk a little bit about Longhorn and the nature of that project. I remember when Longhorn was just getting started, so they were still working on permits. Their office was in a little building on Allen Parkway in Houston.

My company office was right across the hall from that company office. I ended up meeting O.B. Harris just walking through the halls and got to talking to him about, “Who are you, and what do you do?” and all that. That was goodness. 25 years ago now, I guess.

Vince: It’s been probably more than that. You may not remember, but you met O.B.’s lawyer, too, one day.

Russel: I do. I do vaguely remember that. The Longhorn project, they were taking an existing pipeline, modifying some of the routes, and turning it around to ship from East to West. That was with refined products, right? Have I got that right?

Vince: That’s correct. The crude oil line ran from Crane down to Baytown, and so there was a reversal of that, and then an extension out to El Paso.

[crosstalk]

Russel: To do that, you routed that through Austin, more or less.

Vince: It was already there. It was already in Austin. Austin had grown out over the pipeline.

Russel: Yes, which is a common thing. There was all kinds of resistance about what was going on with Longhorn, and particularly, what it was doing going through the Edwards Aquifer.

Vince: That’s right. I won’t name names, but there were some corporate-level funding of the opposition. Like I said, mainly city of Austin and the LCRA. It evolved into the NEPA litigation.

When we did the environmental assessment, we had to go through the typical process there, the project description and looking at the history of the line and all that stuff and devised a lot of mitigation measures that we could do to reduce the probability of occurrence, and if something happened, then to have the resources to respond in a fulsome manner.

The other thing we had was that the pipeline crossed the recharge zone of the Edwards Aquifer and Barton Springs segment, which happened to be the only home of the endangered Barton Springs salamander. We had to go through a great deal of work with the Fish and Wildlife Service to get clearance to start operation.

Russel: One of the things I’ve learned working with you…It was a number of things, but a couple of the key takeaways. One is that writing is hard. I knew writing was hard, but it’s also extremely valuable work.

When you’re doing this kind of writing, where you’re engaging with these other outside parties outside the industry, the regulatory authorities and the other folks that are oppositional, if you will, you have to realize who you’re writing for. A big part of the legal work is understanding what you’re writing, the purpose you’re writing, and who’s going to be reading it. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Vince: Sure. That is a skill set that I developed and honed working on the Longhorn Project because we had to deal with EPA and the Office of Pipeline Safety inside of then RSPA, now PHMSA. The Department of Justice was involved.

I had to write persuasive material, but learned that if you can’t give someone a mental picture of what you’re talking about, they will not understand what you’re talking about. One of our hallmarks over here is to try to help the reader construct that mental picture of the facility itself so that then we can speak to whatever we need to say about a given facility.

To me, it’s a great deal of constructing that mental picture for the reader and making it easy on them to find their way through your document so that they don’t become frustrated and have to interrupt their reading to go look something up somewhere else, etc. We try to make it very easy on the reader to understand what we’re talking about, and then to absorb the conclusions that we come to.

Russel: That is for engineers in particular. We’re taught how to visualize so the visualization comes natural and it’s presumptive that people have that mental image of things, right?

Vince: That’s right.

Russel: Then we have all of this extraordinarily technical language that we use. Even an engineer in one domain talking to an engineer in another domain may not understand the other because of all the technical jargon, right?

Vince: That’s exactly right.

Russel: You have all this technical jargon. A big part of what you do is you take that technical jargon, you figure out how to get it down in words and pictures on paper so that a judge or an attorney or a third party or a regulator can read it and understand it, and that is no small thing. Man, that is no small thing.

Vince: Certainly, you have to know who your audience is and what their level of exposure has been. They might not have ever heard of what you’re talking about.

You have to take into account who they are, what their level of expertise might be, whether they’ve been exposed to something before so that you can explain it in the right manner, at the right level, not appear condescending, but also not to go over their head and have them just scratching their head wondering what in the world you’re trying to tell them.

Russel: One of the things that I’ve learned from working with you is that effort is a predicate to everything else you do because if you don’t do that well, everything else gets harder.

Vince: Everything else does get much more difficult. You’re exactly right, Russel.

Russel: Why is it so important that people have this understanding, and how does that play out when you’re trying to get a pipeline permitted and constructed and put into operations?

Vince: You want them to understand what you’re talking about. Most of what we’re doing is persuasive in nature, whether it’s the agency, whether it’s a permitting agency, or the PHMSA, the regulatory agency, or if it’s a permitting entity, maybe we’re writing something for public dissemination.

If you don’t give them the right idea and if you’re not accurate in what you’re saying, then someone somewhere will discover your inaccuracies and your misstatements, and then you’re tangled up in the rope. They’re trying to explain what it was you thought you were explaining before.

That’s why we put a great deal of effort into the initial writing so that we can try to predict questions and answer those questions before they can be asked.

Russel: One of the things that seems to be a big conversation when I’m talking to pipeliners is the challenges with getting things permitted, constructed, and placed into operations. There’s a lot of conversation about stakeholder engagement and how that plays into this. Do you have an opinion about how we, as an industry, could do a better job of that?

Vince: One thing we can do is wrap our arms around RP 1185 and the public engagement recommended practice.

That ongoing, deliberate communication with our stakeholders is certainly better received than silence and having your audience whether it’s your opposition, whether it’s your permitting agency or whomever, having them wondering what you’re doing, wondering why you’re doing something, where or when you’re going to do it, and things like that.

I’m a big proponent, particularly in the project development stage, of going out very early and learning who your audience is and who might have an objection to what you’re attempting to accomplish.

Russel: That’s certainly thematic in the people that I ask this question is, the early you can gauge, the better.

Vince: Absolutely.

Russel: The other thing that comes up for me when I have this conversation is the…Again, I’m struggling to frame this a little bit so far out of my expertise.

Knowing the audience and writing for the audience in a way that you’re leading the conversation, I don’t mean manipulating it, but leading it and anticipating the struggle they’re going to have trying to read it and understand it and try to address that effectively.

One of the outcomes of that is you build trust because when I’m a third party and I get a report and I can’t read it and I can’t understand it and I got to hire some experts interpreted for me, that creates distrust.

Vince: It creates friction. It creates distrust. It costs people money. The easier you can make the absorption of the information, the better off you’ll be in the long run.

Russel: I want to pivot a little bit. What does a pipeline attorney do every day? What is your J-O-B? What are you actually doing?

Vince: Let’s look at what I’m doing today. I had a conversation this morning on the project that we’re working on, unexpected. Then, I spoke with one of the trade associations about the status of Pipeline Safety Act reauthorization. I’m talking to you right now. Midday, I’ll be talking business-wise with a consultant to the law firm.

After that, I’ll be meeting with my associate Roina Baker, about a project we have going on in California, how we’re going to address certain matters there. After that, I will talk about a project that’s in Wisconsin, where we are trying to establish some jurisdictional boundaries around a given set of facilities. That’s that.

Yesterday, again, I worked on that project. Bigger picture conceptually, a lot of what we do is…we do, like I said, virtually everything except the rate-making side.

Our wheelhouse is the pipeline safety regulations and that regulatory world. We might be working on an enforcement case, we might be counseling a client about the new regulation that comes out. For example, the rupture mitigation valve rule has generated a lot of conversation and guidance for our clients.

Sometimes we get a call and it’s, “Oops. Now what do we do?” We do that, and then there’s just ongoing counseling of clients that want to execute a project. Can we do it that way? If we can’t do it that way, is there a way we can do?

A lot of that, and then of course, we put a lot of effort into maintaining rapport, not only with the industry but with regulators. We’ve put a lot of effort into maintaining that line of communication, whether it’s down to the level of the inspector, the regional director, and on up to the Washington DC folks.

Russel: I’d like you to talk a little bit about the adjudication process. For context who you’re talking to when you’re on this podcast is primarily you’re talking to engineers, operations people, compliance people, that sort of thing.

Most of the people that listen to this probably rarely, if ever, have any engagement with attorneys or adjudication. Can you talk to us a little bit about that process and what it is and how it works as part of your practice and part of what you do to support the industry?

Vince: I wasn’t expecting that, so let me see if I can think on my feet. The enforcement process is, in one word, difficult. The way PHMSA does things is, we’ll take the notice of probable violation as an example where they will issue that to an operator. You have 30 days to respond, you can request a hearing. Then once you have the hearing, you can submit a post-hearing brief, if you will.

Then the region, whichever region you’re in, will issue a recommendation. We used to not, but we do now have the opportunity to respond to that region recommendation. That all gets rolled up, and if you do go to hearing, then the presiding official will prepare a recommended decision.

If you submit only a written response, then another attorney in the PHMSA office of chief counsel will prepare a recommended decision and those all go to the associate administrator for pipeline safety, how it may vary, for his final OK and signature. There’s a lot inside there that we don’t see, but that’s the overall process.

Once you get started on one of those, you have to make decisions, whether we’re going to challenge a given alleged violation or not, what bases we have to challenge whether it’s a factual basis, whether it’s a regulatory basis, whether it’s a statutory basis. Then you get with your client, you decide how you’re going to go after the case, and then you get to work.

Tremendous amount of work goes into preparing for hearings. In the PHMSA world, we have, what we call, informal adjudication, which means we don’t really have rules of procedure and we have nominal rules of evidence.

There’s not a lot of adherence to the rules of evidence. Historically, hearings were just a big conversation, discussion, maybe some argument, things of that nature, very unstructured. What we try to do is to try to build some structure into the process.

Sometimes, it’s frustrating for the presiding officials. Sometimes, it’s frustrating for the folks on the PHMSA side of the table.

We make sure that we understand very clearly where they’re coming from with their allegations and their factual bases, and then we also put on a robust affirmative case. Whether we have evidence, whether we have arguments, we’ll put our witnesses up, we’ll put our documents into the record.

We’ll explain how it is, that, no, in fact, we were in compliance with the given regulation, whatever it might be, if we can. If we can’t, we typically won’t challenge something like that.

Russel: How formal is the adjudication process? Let me give you, again, the frame for the question I’m asking. My only experience with something like that is I’ve been brought in as an expert to give testimony to FERC. We go to FERC, there’s a three-judge panel.

It’s kind of like going to court, in terms of the way it’s structured and how everything occurs. It sounds like with the PHMSA process, it’s more like going to a committee.

Vince: It is somewhat like a committee, and I’ll make a comment about committees in a second. Physically, we’re all in a big conference room, PHMSA folks on one side and operator folks on the other side, and then the presiding official.

The presiding official is an attorney within the office of the deputy chief counsel. They do have segregation of function duties that they have to adhere to. It’s not formal at all. One thing…

[crosstalk]

Russel: It’s much more like a mediation.

Vince: It is much more like a mediation. That’s a very good concept to [inaudible 24:55] . We’re not necessarily in a mediation mode, because we will have a very structured approach to a hearing. Like I said, PHMSA doesn’t typically put on an affirmative case, and so we start out cross-examining their witnesses.

After we finish that, we will shift over to our affirmative case. We try to build some structure into the process. Again, it can be frustrating to the folks on the other side, but eventually, we get to the meat of the matter and we put on our case and put on our witnesses and our arguments.

For us, the biggest event is the hearing, to start with, and then second is the post-hearing briefing. That’s where we bring everything together and put forth our factual bases and our arguments for why it is we believe that our client was not in violation.

Russel: I’m trying to put myself into the place of an operator. There’d be a lot of thought that would go into whether or not I want to pursue that process, because it’s going to be very time-consuming. It’s going to consume resources. It’s going to consume money.

I’m going to have to have a pretty strong belief that I’m right and there’s got to be a pretty strong economic, and operational, and safety basis for doing all that.

Vince: That’s right. It can become expensive. A lot of times, we’ll have a client, I’ll be looking online and see that a client received an enforcement case and they resolve it on their own. By the time we get to it, they know whether they want to fight back or not.

They’ve already put a lot of thought into it. They’ve already done their digging on their side. Of course, they obviously know a lot better than we do what their bases are to start with. Usually, by the time we hear from a client about an enforcement case, they’re ready to go ahead and challenge it.

Russel: They’re doing all that decision-making internal before you ever get involved.

Vince: That’s right. I will say this, that if you can resolve a given allegation based on a factual basis, those are the relatively easy. It’s matters of principle that are difficult, they’re more expensive. Sometimes, you will see a given client with an issue.

You get the final order back, and all of a sudden, you’re starting to hear from other operators and the trades, and everybody’s up in arms about that precedent that would be set by that. That’s when you have to start considering the challenge and taking it up either to reconsideration by the associate administrator or going to the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Russel: Right, and that’s when you start getting outside of the PHMSA process and you get into a real legal process. There’s some of that going on right now related to the gathering rule.

Vince: I may have something like that going on myself right now, Russel.

Russel: [laughs] I don’t want you to talk about anything you can’t talk about.

Vince: I’m not going to talk about it. [laughs]

Russel: I want to talk a little bit about consent decrees, what they are, and how they fit into this overall mix of what the legal things that occur are. I know that’s very technical legal language right there. What are consent decrees, and how do they fit into all this?

Vince: Typically, you’ll see a consent decree brought from a statutory perspective under the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act has a strict liability regime. You put oil in the water, you’re liable, period. There’s no arguing about that. There’s two kinds of consent decrees.

Sometimes, an operator may have a series of unfortunate events that lead EPA and Department of Justice to make allegations under the Clean Water Act. Or, you could have a material accident, a major accident that gets a lot of publicity, etc., things of that nature. Interestingly, we don’t see, typically, PHMSA become involved in the consent decree.

PHMSA has its own procedure. We’ve been talking about that, how they come and allege a violation and impose a fine, issue a compliance order, and things like that. Typically, it’s EPA, and state environmental agencies, and Department of Justice will get together and bring their allegations under the Clean Water Act as well as under state law.

They’ll roll all that up into the consent decree, which is a mechanism that, in practice, is used to ratchet up, if you will, integrity management measures, maybe some control room measures, maybe both, and things like that. They’re very driven by the accidents or the major accident that give rise to the claim.

You will almost always see the EPA and Justice will be directing injunctive measures. You’ll see those be directed at the cause or causes of a given accident.

Russel: My frame for that, because I’ve been involved with a handful of consent decrees as a subject matter expert, is operator has an issue, that issue goes to court, they frame a settlement agreement, and they call it a consent decree.

The settlement agreement says, “You’re going to pay these fines. You’re going to do these things. If you don’t do these things, you’re going to pay these fines.” Those things that they’re being asked to do are typically more rigorous safety-related things.

Vince: Rigorous is a good word because typically, they will be more rigorous than would be required under the Pipeline Safety Regulations.

Russel: Right. They’re asking them to do things that go beyond the regulations and move towards best practices. Typically, what I see is they’re not asking you in a consent decree to do things that are defined in the Pipeline Safety Act. They’re asking you to do things that are defined in industry standards.

Vince: That’s right.

Russel: Which generally are more robust and more current than what’s in the Pipeline Safety Act.

Vince: Right. It depends on a lot. You’re talking about the process. We’re talking about in the context of consent decrees, the settlement. That’s the settlement of a case. Oftentimes, we see sometimes years of discourse between EPA, and Justice, and a given operator before they even file their claim.

Typically, what you see is that they have already worked out what the claims will be. They’ve known that. The feds have known that. They’ll work on the injunctive measures, whether it’s running in-line inspection, whether it’s replacing crossings of waterways, whether it’s enhancing control room management processes and procedures, things of that nature.

That’s what gets worked out a lot of times before you ever see the claim hit the courthouse.

Russel: That’s right. Exactly. By the time the consent decree is filed with the court, everybody pretty much knows what they’re going to be doing.

[crosstalk]

Russel: They’re probably already moving in that direction in some substantial way.

Vince: The alternative is to go into federal court and litigate those claims by the federal agencies. It’s like, “Where do we want to put our effort, into the pipeline system or fighting [inaudible 32:42] ?”

Russel: “Who do I want to pay, the engineers and constructors, or do I want to pay the attorneys?”

Vince: It’s sad to say that there’s a bunch of lawyers usually involved all the way through.

Russel: You’re going to pay both. [laughs] That’s true. Look, Vince, this is a great conversation. The things that is interesting to me is to know that there are even attorneys out there that focus exclusively on pipelining.

Vince: There’s not a lot of us.

Russel: There’s just a handful, but for those that do, what I would say is for the pipeline operators, having an attorney that knows the business, and knows the regulations, and knows the people, and the players, and all that, it’s a huge, huge benefit. There’s a lot of cost of educating that doesn’t have to occur.

Vince: I don’t want to be disparaging, but from time to time, we see people give a go at being a pipeline lawyer. More often than not, they wander away after a few years. I’ll say that I enjoy the technical side. I enjoy being able to speak about the technical side from an informed perspective. I like to say I play an engineer on TV.

I’ll also say that doing this work and working with the people that we work with, in my view, that’s the most fun a lawyer can have.

Russel: I would agree with that, given some of the stuff that we’ve done together. When you get to work at the very top level of industry and you get to work with some of the best and brightest in their expertise and really dig into issues, it’s rewarding. It’s fun.

It’s challenging. It’s hard work. It’s not unusual that you lock horns with people and you have a vigorous argument to get to an answer. It’s like I’m not arguing with you, I’m arguing for the outcome.

Vince: It’s interesting that more often than not, we get to a hearing and everybody is saying, “Hey, how are you doing? How are the kids?” Stuff like that. You sit in the hearing, you have these contentious exchanges. We hope they don’t get contentious, but once in a while, they do.

Then, when the hearing’s over, you’re, “Hey, good to see you. How’s that other project coming?” Things like that. There’s a high degree of respect among the various players in that context, and you have to maintain that, because you’re going to be talking to these people about another case in a couple of weeks or maybe tomorrow. You never know.

Russel: There is honor in argument. There really is honor in argument.

Vince: Absolutely.

Russel: Look, thanks for coming on and being a guest. I don’t know why it took me so [inaudible 35:36] long [laughs] to ask you to come on.

Vince: Russel, I’ll say my feelings weren’t hurt but I was thinking about feeling that way. [laughs]

Russel: I don’t know. For some reason, I made up you didn’t want to do it. Who knows.

Vince: I’m glad you had me on. It’s been fun. It’s enjoyable. I love talking about this stuff. Hopefully, that comes through.

Russel: I hope the listeners learn a little bit about what attorneys are doing, and hopefully it takes away. I know for a lot of engineers, all this stuff can be very intimidating. I’d like to think that if you learn a little bit more about it, what’s going on, it becomes less intimidating. It makes it easier to engage.

Vince: That’s part of what we do, is to guide people through the process, and help them be comfortable with their positions and what they had to say, getting through a hearing. That’s another element of it.

Russel: Listen, thanks for being our guest, and we’ll have to get you back.

Vince: Thanks for having me on Russel. I know we’ll talk soon.

Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of The Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Vince. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast Yeti tumbler. Simply visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win and enter yourself in the drawing. If you’d like to support this podcast, please leave us a review.

You can do that on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, wherever you happen to listen. If you have questions, ideas, or topics you’d be interested in, please let me know on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

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