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:  Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, Justine Thompson, George Hays, Hutton Brown, David Deganian and Ashten Bailey. Our Office Manager is Scott Sykes. Their professional biographies with email links are below.

Stephanie Stuckey Benfield is GreenLaw's Executive Director.  An outdoors enthusiast and nature lover, Stephanie has been a vocal environmental advocate during her 14 years as a member of the Georgia House’s Natural Resource Committee.  She received both an undergraduate and law degree from the University of Georgia.  She graduated cum laude from the University of Georgia School of Law in 1992.  She then served as a public defender and then went into private practice before being elected to the Georgia General Assembly in 1999.  Stephanie’s legal expertise was recognized in 2011 when she was given the Outstanding Lawyer in Public Service Award by the Atlanta Bar Association. Her commitment to clean water and clean air issues grew even stronger after her son, Robert, was diagnosed with asthma.

Justine Thompson is a senior attorney at GreenLaw where her work focuses on addressing the pollution from coal fired power plants.  With the GreenLaw legal team, Thompson led efforts that led to the defeat of a proposed coal plant in Early County, and is working with local organizations to challenge two additional coal plants in  Washington County and Ben Hill County which, if built, would emit over 16million tons of carbon dioxide each year.  Justine served over 12 years as GreenLaw's Executive Director until April 2012 when she stepped down and moved to Florida to be with her family.  She continues to work with GreenLaw from her home office in Orlando, Florida.  Justine 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 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.

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.

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.

Ashten Bailey is a Staff Attorney with GreenLaw where she focuses on implementation of the Clean Water Act and addressing pollution from coal fired power plants.  She is a graduate of Emory University School of Law, and received her undergraduate degree from Smith College.  While in law school, she worked as a student attorney with the Turner Environmental Law Clinic, and served as an intern for Region IV of the EPA. 

Scott Sykes has over twenty 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 11^th 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.