Environmental Litigation Associates (ELA) was formed to provide the legal community with access to an integrated team of consultants and expert witnesses in the fields of environmental sciences and engineering. ELA is comprised of eight senior scientists and engineers with strong technical ability in one or more scientific or engineering disciplines.

The Associates of ELA each manage and operate consulting practices which operate independently of ELA and who sponsors, in part, The Institute of Environmental Technology (IET) in Houston, Texas. They also serve as Lecturers in the IET training programs to encourage and promote good science and engineering and thereby minimize unnecessary litigation. As primary objectives, ELA facilitates technical litigation support and expert-witness testimony for both plaintiffs and defendant causes throughout the U.S.

Most environmental litigation involves more than one of the disciplines represented in ELA. The eight senior Associates have worked together on numerous consulting and engineering projects since 1988; each Principal provides input to a project according to their specialized technical background and experience. This has resulted in a synergistic effect in many of the projects where the whole was clearly more than the sum of the parts. Recent projects involving two or more of the Principals have shown that the principle of professional synergism clearly applies to litigation support and tends to broaden each of the Principal's perspective and ability to support the attorneys' efforts in their practice of environmental law or any other litigation requiring scientific and/or engineering support. This synergism ordinarily will not prevail in a group composed of independent technical experts and consultants or in many consulting companies today.