Chris Stoneback is Senior Counsel in Crowley Fleck’s Kalispell office. Chris’s practice focuses on environmental and natural resources law and commercial litigation. For more than 20 years, Chris has helped clients solve complex legal challenges, facilitating compliant achievement of client objectives and moving critical client projects and initiatives forward with confidence.
Chris has significant experience across a spectrum of environmental issues, including water, air, waste, environmental review, and environmental cleanup, and in varied settings, including transactional, permitting, administrative, and trial and appellate court. Chris often works in highly technical regulatory frameworks, advising clients on matters requiring a nuanced understanding of both the law and the underlying operational realities. Chris enjoys teaming with clients, facilitating their efforts to permit projects, execute operations, mitigate risk, and litigate their interests where necessary. Chris values creativity and looking at issues, and their potential solutions, from multiple angles.
Chris’s past work includes energy and natural resource project transactions, permitting, compliance, responses to enforcement actions, and cleanup, and he has litigated matters in the waste (RCRA, CERCLA, and state equivalents), water (Clean Water Act and state equivalents), air (Clean Air Act and state equivalents), and environmental review (NEPA and state equivalents) contexts. Chris was previously co-chair of the firm’s Energy and Environmental and Natural Resources and Environmental Litigation practice groups. Before re-joining the firm, Chris spent 3 1⁄2 years as Senior Environmental Counsel for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he helped the Laboratory compliantly execute its national security missions.
Outside of his practice, Chris enjoys spending time with his family and exploring the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains.