Biography
Crystal is an attorney with Preti Flaherty’s Environmental Practice Group in the firm’s Portland, Maine, office. She counsels clients on a variety of complex procedural, legislative, and regulatory issues related to environmental law. With more than two decades of service as a career law clerk in the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, including eleven as Supervisory Law Clerk, Crystal’s deep institutional knowledge base spans the breadth of federal, state, and local law, with extensive experience in researching and analyzing a host of legal issues according to constitutional, statutory, administrative, and precedential law.
Crystal is a graduate of the University of Maine School of Law in Portland, Maine, and Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. As an undergrad, she served as an intern in the Behavioral Science Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Quantico, Virginia, researching issues regarding the intersection of law and psychology. While in law school, she held internships at the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and the Cumberland County District Attorney’s Office in Portland, Maine. After law school, Crystal worked as a litigation associate at a respected Maine law firm, practicing federal and state civil litigation in commercial, products liability, bankruptcy, tort, real estate, and land use matters. As Supervisory Law Clerk for the Maine Supreme Court, Crystal served in the chambers of Justice Ellen A. Gorman, Justice Robert W. Clifford, and Chief Justice Leigh I. Saufley, conducting detailed research, advising the Court and making recommendations regarding all manner of case dispositions, and writing and editing judicial opinions, in addition to supervising, training, and mentoring a team of attorneys on issues of legal substance and procedure, writing technique, and ethics.
Crystal lives in Westbrook, Maine.