About Our Lawyers

Hannah is a dynamic and dedicated lawyer who has worked alongside Craig M. Collins for approximately ten years handling real estate damages cases on behalf of plaintiffs, both in inverse condemnation and in claims against private owners for nuisance, trespass and negligence. She is a trusted client contact and assists with bench and jury trials as well as all other aspects of case preparation in such matters. 

Hannah Bentley simultaneously received her B.A. and J.D. from Occidental College and Columbia Law School as a result of an accelerated program between those two institutions in 1987.  She then worked on litigation matters for a large international law firm in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Tokyo for over four years and then established her own private practice; within a year of doing so, she and cocounsel obtained a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against the U.S. Department of the Interior and the State of California when they attempted to proceed with a planned radioactive waste dump in what should have been critical habitat for the threatened desert tortoise.  That case also resulted in the designation of critical habitat for the tortoise in the Mojave Desert. 

She filed the first known cases leading to settlements under the federal Clean Air Act and the State of California’s former green label statute with respect to the use of ozone depleting chemicals in products including refrigerators. 

Several of her early environmental cases were covered by CNN, the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Recorder, and the Daily Journal.

She has extensive experience primarily representing petitioners in cases under the California Environmental Quality Act.  Most recently, she successfully opposed a real party’s motion to dismiss a petition based on the alleged failure to name all real parties, she drafted a brief for a petitioner which caused a developer to abandon a motion to dismiss a petition based on a statute of limitations argument and instead to settle with the petitioner before the motion could be heard, and she prevailed on a writ of mandate for a petitioner arguing that an environmental impact report did not analyze energy impacts.