InsideCounsel » April 2008
Nature's Counsel
The National Wildlife Federation’s GC Cynthia Lewin takes on global warming.
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: To read about Lewin's take on lobbying and hybrid cars, click here.
Cynthia Lewin has combined her interest in the environment and her legal experience with non-profits to help the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) in its fight against global warming. As secretary, senior vice president and general counsel of the NWF, Lewin has activated the federation’s lobbying subsidiary, allowing the Reston, Va.-based non-profit to have a bigger legislative presence than it’s allowed to as a charity.
Since joining the NWF in early 2006, Lewin has proved to be a true player in the non-profit arena. Among her first orders of business was keeping more legal issues in-house, which ultimately reduced outside legal costs by more than 75 percent. She also negotiated the sale of NWF’s catalog division. Most recently, Lewin oversaw the legal aspects of a NWF ad in USA Today calling on Congress to enact federal global warming legislation signed by more than 600 sportsmen’s groups.
Today, Lewin is a natural leader for NWF’s legal department, but she cut her non-profit teeth during a 10-year stint as general counsel for Volunteers of America (VOA), a national organization that sponsors human service programs. During that time she built a legal department at the 100-year-old non-profit and simplified its complex governance system, which gave the organization room to grow and move forward with its mission.
Q: After 10 years at VOA, how did you wind up at the NWF?
A: The reason I left VOA was really Hurricane Katrina. It was such an incredibly painstaking effort for us to pull together and try to help all of these people who had been displaced. I felt we needed to address the causes of these storms and that global warming was an important cause. I came to NWF because I wanted to work on global warming issues, and this organization focuses on global warming as the key threat to wildlife as well as to humanity. I knew that the general counsel at the NWF had left, so I went to them.
Q: Besides global warming, what are other major issues the NWF focuses on?
A: We have three strategic drivers under our current strategic plan. One is to confront global warming. The second is to protect and restore habitat for wildlife. And the third is to connect people with nature—which is something not very many other environmental organizations are doing. We publish award-winning children’s educational magazines, which is a way for us to raise the next generation of conservationists.
Q: What kind of legal issues do you handle on a day-to-day basis?
A: We do a lot of contract negotiations. We have a number of licensing deals for the National Wildlife Federation name, partnering with corporations like organic wine and organic flowers companies, and with Green Mountain Coffee. We also work with movie companies on movies that have environmental themes, like “Hoot” [a film about a boy who fights to protect endangered owls]. There’s a featurette about the NWF on the DVD so we do a lot of intellectual property deals. Also, I do a lot of lobbying, political activity advice and day-to-day advice on what we can and cannot do as a non-profit.
Q: I read about a case the NWF filed against the DOE. Do you encounter many major litigation issues at the NWF?
A: We have practically none in terms of business litigation. One of the really cool things here is that we get involved with environmental litigation. We have about a dozen staff environmental litigators who are able to bring lawsuits, and we have about 25 active environmental lawsuits going on. The DOE case specifically is an exciting one. To confront global warming, part of what we need to do is come up with different kinds of energy sources that emit less carbon, and coal is one of the most carbon-emitting energy sources. We filed suit against the DOE to keep it from promoting coal over other forms of energy production. They’re trying to create a mid-Atlantic electric transmission corridor that’s going to override all the environmental laws to fast-track siting processes for new coal plants, and we really don’t want the coal plants to be built. We aren’t comfortable with this new approach of overriding the existing environmental laws and bypassing state processes for how to locate infrastructure and so on. So we’re contesting that.
