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Our Staff
In order to provide high quality legal and technical assistance to Georgia’s environmental community, GreenLaw maintains a staff of highly qualified individuals. Our attorneys are: Justine Thompson, George Hays, Hutton Brown, Kurt Ebersbach and David Deganian. Our Communications Director is Anne Harper and our Office Manager is Scott Sykes. Their professional biographies with email links are below.
Justine Thompson has served over 12 years as the Executive Director of GreenLaw, where her work focuses on air quality, water quality and environmental justice. She is the longest serving public interest environmental attorney in Georgia. She has been a lead attorney in most of GreenLaw’s notable cases and her successes include defeating a proposed thousand-acre landfill that would dump out-of-state waste in a poor minority community, requiring a polluter to pay a $1 million fine for dumping cyanide into a river, and requiring a power company to spend over $50 million to prevent excessively heated discharges from a power plant that had caused massive fish kills. Thompson has significant experience in addressing pollution emitted by coal-fired power plants. With the GreenLaw legal team, Thompson is challenging 3 proposed coal plants in Early County, Washington County and Ben Hill County. which, if built, would emit over 21 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. Thompson also worked as an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center and the law firm, Chorey, Taylor & Feil. She served as law clerk for United States District Court Judge Robert L. Echols. She received a J.D. with honors from Duke University in 1995 where she served on the editorial board of the Duke Law Journal. Prior to law school, Thompson worked for Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation and other state and national environmental organizations.
Hutton Brown is a Senior Attorney with GreenLaw where he focuses his work on implementation of the federal Clean Water Act. He brings with him over twenty years of experience litigating in state and federal court. He is a graduate of Vanderbilt University where he was on the Vanderbilt Law Review, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee where he graduated magna cum laude. He began his legal career at King & Spalding, followed by a successful tenure at Doffermyre Shields Canfield Knowles & Devine. For the ten years prior to joining GreenLaw, Hutton had been litigating at Brown & Shamp doing environmental toxic torts, product liability and other plaintiffs' work.
David Deganian joins GreenLaw as the University of Georgia School of Law Public Interest Fellow. In this position, he focuses on environmental justice in the Atlanta metropolitan area, providing legal services to the underrepresented. He is a graduate of Georgia State University College of Law and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia. While a law student, David served as an intern for GreenLaw, EPA’s Region IV, and the U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of the Regional Solicitor. He is a former Fulton County Assistant Public Defender and has worked as a pro bono staff attorney with the Environmental Law Foundation in Oakland, CA. He is licensed to practice law in Georgia and California.
Andrea Hansberry was born and raised in London, England, Andrea has always had a knack for speaking and a passion for story-telling. After graduating from the University of Maryland with a degree in Communications/Public Relations in 2003, she moved to Georgia where she worked in the film industry, putting her passions to good use. Ms. Hansberry spent the next 3 years working as an Art Director in films, videos, television and special event productions. In 2006, Ms. Hansberry was an Admissions Advisor at Life University for a year before joining the 3-woman team at EarthShare of Georgia, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the environment. As the Director of Business Development, she managed more than 75 employee-giving campaigns, was the project manager for ESGA’s events, including their Earth Day celebrations, and was also responsible for acquiring new business for her organization. In her spare time, Andrea enjoys traveling, shopping, and hanging out with her three expensive daughters and cats Jane Doe and Wila Ying.
George Hays is a leading national expert in air quality laws bringing with him over twenty-two years of experience. George worked in several leadership positions for the United States Environmental Protection Agency in the Office of General Counsel. In recent years, he has successfully litigated complex cases for such groups as Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the National Parks Conservation Association, the Alabama Environmental Council and others. He serves as an Adjunct Professor at the Golden Gate University School of Law. George is an honor graduate of Cornell Law School where he served as a Note Editor for the Cornell Law Review and received the Herbert R. Reif Prize awarded by the Cornell Law School faculty for the best Law Review Note. He also clerked for United States District Court Judge Stephen V. Wilson in Los Angeles. George graduated cum laude from Amherst College.
Scott Sykes has fifteen years of legal experience as an office manager and paralegal for large and small law firms. He has worked as a docket clerk for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and a customer service representative for legal support companies. He received a B.S. in advertising from the University of Florida and a paralegal certificate from the National Center for Paralegal Training.
Consultants
Chandra Brown, founding Riverkeeper and recently retired executive director of Ogeechee Riverkeeper, manages GreenLaw's online presence. As the director of Ogeechee Riverkeeper,Chandra learned on the job marketing and communications skills and grew her rural organization from nothing to nearly 2,000 members. Chandra also implemented programs to monitor streams, educated the public on stream preservation, and advocated for clean water in the Canoochee and Ogeechee Rivers. Under her direction, Ogeechee Riverkeeper strengthened protection of wetland forests, helped to secure lower state emissions from mercury on coal-fired power plants, and was a leader and successful coalition partner in efforts to prevent the injection of chemically treated water into Georgia's aquifers. She "retired" in 2011 to spend more time with her young daughters and works from her home office in Metter, Georgia, where her "tweets" can be heard across Georgia and beyond.
Anne Harper provides GreenLaw with excellent consulting services based on her extensive experience in the nonprofit, public, and private sectors. She is the head of Harper Consulting, a management consulting practice. Previously she was a Communications Consultant with McKinsey & Co., Inc. Harper served on the Atlanta Board of Education from 1994 to 2001. A long-time activist on behalf of women and girls, Harper worked with state legislators to initiate the Equity in Sports Act of 2000, incorporating Title IX into Georgia law. She has served on the boards of many civic organizations, including the New York-based NOW Legal Defense & Education Fund (renamed Legal Momentum), Cool Girls, Girls on the Run of Atlanta, Feminist Women's Health Center, Atlanta Partners for Education, and Odyssey. Harper was named a YWCA Woman of Achievement. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan and a B.A. magna cum laude from Smith College.
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(Left to right) Scott Sykes, Andrea Hansberry, David Deganian, Justine Thompson, Hutton Brown & Kurt Ebersbach
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