Chris Campbell

Chris Campbell joined Baron & Budd’s Dallas Environmental Litigation Group in August of 2016. He works with our west coast environmental team representing municipalities harmed by hazardous chemicals, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and Trichloroethylene (TCEs), which have been allowed to leach into the soil and community drinking water systems by unscrupulous corporations.

Mr. Campbell’s affinity for the environment began at an early age, as he explored the riverbanks near his childhood home in Wichita, Kansas and later the wooded expanses near his Fort Worth area backyard, developing a love of the outdoors. After graduating from the University of North Texas in 2007 with a B.S. in Criminal Justice, Mr. Campbell enrolled in the Texas Wesleyan School of Law (now Texas A & M University School of Law), where he became vice president of the Sports and Entertainment Law Society and did pro bono work for Legal Aid of Northwest Texas.

After obtaining his law degree, Mr. Campbell honed his litigating skills working in probate and estate planning, elder law, breach of contract, and employment law. He worked for a time at a firm in Corpus Christi representing vehicular accident clients whose cases had been turned down by other firms. Through his diligent and thoughtful investigation (talking to witnesses and police officers, carefully examining the opposing party’s reckless driving and cell phone records), Mr. Campbell was able to establish solid cases and secure recoveries for many of those clients. “It felt good to know that I had obtained sizeable compensation for the suffering my clients had undergone through months of physical therapy and the stress of not knowing how they would pay their medical bills” he says. Mr. Campbell also gained experience in antitrust law, working on a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) probe into a major oil and gas company executive who was being investigated for possible fraudulent business activities.

It was while Chris Campbell was working in Corpus Christi that he first experienced what it was like to live in an area where the municipal water was not fit to drink – or bathe or wash clothes in. Over the course of two years, from 2015 to 2016, the City of Corpus Christi was forced to issue multiple “water advisories” warning its citizens to boil their drinking water because it was contaminated with bacteria, including on one occasion E. coli, and on another by an asphalt emulsifier called indulin AA86, which no amount of boiling, freezing, filtering or treating could eradicate.

It was this exposure to the hardships a community suffers when a resource as vital and elemental as drinking water becomes contaminated that led Mr. Campbell to seek employment with Baron & Budd’s Environmental Litigation Group. Now he coordinates discovery and e-discovery projects for our west coast environmental litigation team, helping the Group represent municipalities harmed by PCBs, TCE, TCB, MTBE and atrazine in groundwater and municipal water systems. He also leads document review teams hired by Baron & Budd on a contract basis.

When he is not fighting to clean up the water, air and soil, Chris Campbell still enjoys being outdoors more than anything else. As a youth he organized neighborhood sports leagues in football, baseball and basketball. He is a rabid Texas Rangers baseball fan, traveling throughout the country to attend games whenever possible. But protecting the environment is never far from his mind. ”As a boy I played in the woods near my home, exploring the wilderness and building forts. Now, I work to undermine the fortresses built by big corporations to shield themselves from liability for contaminating our precious resources.”