Meet the Team
Daniel Cooper
partner
Daniel is the founding partner of Sycamore Law, Inc. He was admitted to the California Bar in 1991, and has represented citizen plaintiffs in environmental advocacy for his entire career. Working with Law School clinics, Keepers, and environmental justice organizations, Daniel pioneered enforcement of the NPDES permit for industrial stormwater. Beginning with enforcement against closing military bases in the San Francisco Bay area, and expanding to cases attacking industrial stormwater pollution statewide, industrial stormwater enforcement has eliminated millions of pound toxic pollutants from urban waterways. Similarly Daniel initiated and sustained enforcement against dozens of municipal sewage systems, spilling tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage into neighborhoods, creeks, rivers and bays. New initiatives include State Law enforcement to obtain water for endangered fish, and Clean Water Act enforcement to transform urban water management in California and nationwide, integrating stormwater, wastewater, and drinking water into a single management system that mimics nature, protects receiving waters, and provides water supply resiliency in the face of climate change.
Daniel provides counsel to environmental advocates on advocacy, administrative processes, and litigation in state and federal court.
Jesse C. Swanhuyser
Partner
Jesse joined Sycamore Law in 2019 and works from the firm’s Santa Barbara office. Since graduating from UCLA Law School in 2011 with a specialization in Public Interest Law and Policy, Jesse has focused on advancing client’s interests through administrative advocacy and federal litigation under the Clean Water Act, the Federal Endangered Species Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA).
He began his public interest career in 1999 as a grassroots organizer advocating for the creation a network of science-based marine protected areas around California’s Northern Channel Islands. Following his service as a volunteer relief worker in Central America, Jesse co-founded and served as the first executive director at the California Fair Trade Coalition, where he spent nearly two decades as a campaign manager and lobbyist on behalf of environmental/environmental justice, indigenous, immigrants rights, small farming, and labor organizations fighting for responsible and fair international trade policy. In 2017, Jesse spearheaded U.S. civil society’s legal campaign to defend the Obama Administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from an attack by TransCanada Corp. using the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
At Sycamore Law Jesse supports the firm’s “Water for Fish” advocacy, and leads an innovating campaign aimed at integrating civil society’s enforcement of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act in California’s environmental justice communities, where air and water pollution equally threaten public health and the environment.
Jessica D. Hollinger
ASSOCIATE
Jessica is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley School of Law with certificates in Environmental Law and Public Interest Law, and joined Sycamore Law in 2020. She has previously worked with legal teams in the fields of environmental justice, personal injury, direct services, and death penalty defense. A lifelong resident of Marin County, she has also played an active role in organizing for social justice in her local community. At Sycamore Law, she assists with legal research, writing, and all phases of litigation.
