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Rebecca Baden Chaney is a partner in the firm's Washington, D.C. office and is co-chair of the firm’s Transportation Practice. Transportation, micromobility, consumer, and other product manufacturers lean on Rebecca Chaney’s keen understanding of the transportation and consumer product industries and the legal landscape to advance their businesses. Rebecca applies her commercial-focused product risk lens to represent product manufacturers facing litigation, commercial, and regulatory challenges.

Rebecca is an industry-recognized force in litigating complex product-related warranty, defect, indemnity and contractual commercial disputes, and consumer litigation, including in class actions and mass tort proceedings. She counsels her commercial clients on product disputes, risk mitigation, and crisis management matters. Rebecca additionally defends clients against defamation claims. Clients appreciate Rebecca’s close coordination with them, her proactive approach, and her critical and creative thinking about each stage in a litigation or matter.

Rebecca’s approach embraces product liability risk management across the life cycle of product commercialization, from pre- to post-launch to aftermarket. This includes advice on product labeling, as well as National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Consumer Product Safety Commission regulatory compliance, recall, and enforcement issues.

The Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration has issued final standards for the installation, operation, and maintenance of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations paid for with federal funds pursuant to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and other federal authorities. The standards, which go into effect on March 30, 2023, regulate the types of chargers that may be installed, as well as payment processing, labor, cybersecurity, and data privacy practices for EV charging infrastructure on federal highways.

The IIJA established the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program to provide $5 billion in funding to states, local governments, transportation authorities, and tribes for the acquisition and installation of EV charging infrastructure. The IIJA allows recipients of NEVI Formula Program funds to partner with private entities to operate the EV charging infrastructure, but the new rule limits how income from EV charging stations can be used.

Although the purpose of the NEVI Formula Program is to support the build out of interconnected EV charging infrastructure along federal highways that have been designated as Alternative Fuel Corridors, the standards apply to all projects that install EV charging infrastructure using Title 23 federal funds. The IIJA directed the Secretary of Transportation, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy and stakeholders, to issue minimum guidelines and standards concerning the installation, operation, or maintenance by qualified technicians of electric vehicle charging infrastructure; the interoperability of electric vehicle charging infrastructure; network connectivity of electric vehicle charging infrastructure; and publicly available information about locations, pricing, real-time availability, and accessibility through mapping applications. Continue Reading DOT Releases Final Standards for Federally Funded EV Charging Stations

President Biden will soon sign into law the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which provides $750 billion in funding and major federal policy changes impacting the U.S. energy, environment, healthcare and tax sectors. On August 7, 2022, the IRA passed the U.S. Senate by an all-Democrat 50-50 party line vote, with Vice President Harris breaking the tie and ensuring passage. On August 12, 2022, the IRA passed the U.S. House by a vote of 220 to 207. The President’s signature, will make the bill law, and allow President Biden, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to claim a major victory while making progress on a portion of the President’s Build Back Better agenda just three months before the mid-term elections on November 8, 2022.

The Crowell and Moring LLP and Crowell & Moring International (CMI) teams have put together this Client Alert with two main purposes. The first is to provide a summary of the highlights of the bill, which is included in Section I, and the second is to provide a more detailed section-by-section review of the bill, which is provided in Section II. Continue Reading President Biden To Sign New Inflation Reduction Act

Yesterday, President Biden issued a Fact Sheet entitled Biden Administration Efforts to Address Bottlenecks at Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Moving Goods from Ship to Shelf to help address the “delays and congestion” across the transportation supply chain. As has been widely reported in recent weeks and months, the global supply chain has