Case Studies / Successes

• Expedited federal approval of an Ohio Medicaid waiver providing Ohio school districts US$26 million in new funding annually and US$50 million for previous claims.
  
  
• Arranging to meet with a delegation of members of Congress, USTR, and State and Commerce Department officials to share Kazakhstan officials’ threats to take over an international energy company’s utility facilities. The Kazakhstan officials were also intimidating our client’s employees by arresting and mistreating them. The delegation raised the issue with Kazakhstan’s prime minister, resulting in a satisfactory result for our client.
  
  
• Our client, a preeminent collectible car auction firm, was informed that a US automobile manufacturer had been ordered to pull nearly 100 cars from a three-day auction that had already begun that day to comply with a last-minute regulatory decision by the US Department of Transportation (DOT) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) ruling that the cars could not be sold because they were not approved for the road – even though they were not being sold for use on the road. After speaking with the Transportation Secretary senior staff, our team was able to convince the NHTSA to allow the sale of the cars.
  
  
• Two Europe-based motorcycle companies were dragged into a trade dispute between the United States and the European Union over the EU’s ban on importing US beef that contains certain hormones. The EU’s US-beef ban has been found by the WTO to violate international trade agreements, which means the United States is authorized to retaliate by imposing steep import duties on any products from Europe it chooses, up to a specified amount of trade. The USTR proposed new duties on a list of European products that included motorcycles made by our clients. The 100-percent import duties likely to be imposed would have created severe competition issues with imports from Asia, which could have spelled the end of their sales in the United States. Squire Sanders Public Advocacy met with senior leadership at USTR to understand its concerns and the results it desired to achieve with the additional tariffs on the new products it had selected, then demonstrated to USTR how the proposed duties on our clients would devastate the hundreds of small US businesses including distributors, dealerships, aftermarket sellers and racing teams – and how those duties would have little or no impact on the EU’s position on hormone-containing US beef. USTR chose not to retaliate against our clients, and their US sales therefore can continue without steep import duties.
  
  
• We were asked whether we could help four top executives of a major overseas automobile manufacturer, including the chairman, with difficulties gaining entry to the United States under their duly issued business visas. Even though each senior executive was legally able to travel to the United States, they were subject, because of past legal actions in their country, to multiple long delays as the US Customs and Border Protection Service (CBP) reviewed their entrance and each faced the possibility of diversion and detention for secondary questioning by CBP at US ports of entry. In fact, one of the executives had already been detained and questioned at length before being permitted entry and naturally wished to avoid the annoyance and embarrassment of this kind of questioning for its chairman and top executives. With help from contacts at DHS, we were able to present an argument at the department’s highest levels. The challenge was to convince DHS that US$2.1 billion of foreign direct investment could be at risk, with US workers ultimately paying the price, if the car manufacturer’s senior officials were repeatedly delayed en route to US auto plants in which the company had no small investment. DHS agreed to obtain letters from the State Department for each executive to present to CBP officers in the event that the annotations on their visas become an issue at any point in the future. DHS also agreed to have a high-ranking CBP officer on standby for the chairman’s upcoming visit to the United States to make sure he was processed through immigration smoothly and without delay.
  
  
• Squire Sanders Public Advocacy was retained recently by an Ohio-based engineering and manufacturing company specializing in rare metals research and development to secure an earmark in the Department of Defense appropriations legislation as it made its way from the House to the Senate and, ultimately, to a joint House/Senate conference. Our client and its supporters had not been able to get any money allocated from the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and we came in as the bill moved over to the Senate. We worked closely with Republican and Democratic members of the committee and ultimately secured a US$4 to 5 million earmark. Our client was delighted with this result and we continue to monitor the matter as it goes into a joint conference.
  
  
• Squire Sanders Public Advocacy was approached by a developer and a city’s economic officer who had wanted to purchase a parcel of land from the General Service Administration (GSA) but they had become frustrated with the existing appraisal and bureaucratic delays in the land disposal process. The developers were going to be unable to purchase the property and relocate a new business to the area unless the property in question was able to be sold at a price that more correctly reflected current market conditions. After working with the Congress, GSA and local officials the original value of the land was reduced, therefore saving the deal (and 100 new jobs) and saving our client US$1.4 million.