D’Ann Penner — Dee to her clients and colleagues — represents individuals, families, small businesses, and state agencies in plaintiff-side environmental litigation, with a particular focus on oil contamination, pipeline rights-of-way, and coastal land loss. Her clients include landowners, crawfishermen, shrimpers, workers, and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) — the state agency charged with protecting Louisiana’s wildlife management areas and the way of life they sustain.
A significant portion of Dee’s practice involves Louisiana Environmental Quality Act (LEQA) citizen suits and comparable environmental claims against major oil and gas companies. She is currently part of the trial team in a bench trial against ExxonMobil in DeSoto Parish involving over a century of oil contamination at a North Louisiana tank farm — complex, expert-intensive litigation that draws on her command of environmental science, regulatory history, and industry practice standards.
The LDWF pipeline litigation is Dee’s signature work — a multi-firm, multi-parish effort involving nearly twenty pipeline company defendants that she built from the ground up to hold those companies accountable for destroying the marsh habitat Louisiana’s wildlife management areas exist to protect. She has advanced those cases through every phase — discovery, depositions, expert battles, motions, and resolution — producing substantial recoveries on behalf of the people of Louisiana, with active litigation ongoing.
She also represents plaintiffs in class actions and individual suits against pipeline companies responsible for coastal land loss, and she serves as a member of multi-firm teams pursuing recovery for landowners in some of Louisiana’s most consequential environmental litigation. She is also expanding her practice into equipment removal litigation — cases in which oil companies have abandoned topside equipment on Louisiana landowners’ property, burdening their land and preventing its full use. Her practice spans pipeline right-of-way disputes, oil contamination claims, lease and right-of-way interpretation, equipment removal, breach of contract, and public-trust litigation. She has litigated in state and federal courts throughout Louisiana and has briefed appellate matters before the Louisiana Supreme Court, the Louisiana Circuit Courts of Appeal, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
The daughter and granddaughter of small farmers, Dee came to environmental law through an unconventional path. As a scholar of Russian history at the University of California, Berkeley, a tenured professor at the University of Memphis, a visiting scholar at Columbia University, and later a narrator of the human stories of Hurricane Katrina’s survivors, she developed an abiding appreciation for people’s connections to land, community, and place — and a lawyer’s instinct for finding the facts that matter and telling the story that wins.
Dee majored in history at California State University, Fresno, earning her Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude in 1989. She received her Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in history, both summa cum laude, from the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Juris Doctor from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law in 2012, a Master of Laws in energy and environment from Tulane Law School, and a Master of Laws in litigation management from Baylor Law School. The co-author of two books, she has also written two law review articles and seven articles for the Louisiana Association for Justice’s monthly magazine.
Dee is admitted to practice in Louisiana and before the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern, Middle, and Western Districts of Louisiana, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court. She has been recognized as a Featured Lawyer by Super Lawyers magazine. The National Trial Lawyers has named her to its Top 10 Business Tort Trial Lawyers list in Louisiana since 2021 and to its Top 100 Civil Trial Lawyers in Louisiana since 2020.
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