Work within and develop new legal, practical, and functional frameworks to conserve, create, and interconnect people and parcels of land for public and community uses;
Conservation Law, P.C.
Principal attorney and founder Jessica E. Jay, Attorney at Law, leads a land conservation law firm devoted to ensuring conservation is relevant, accessible, and both endures and anticipates change over time. To do this, Jessica focuses on sound land conservation transactions and the utility and implementation of perpetual conservation easements and other novel conservation tools. She represents and partners with land trusts, government entities, and landowners to conserve working landscapes and environmentally significant properties in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West, and works internally with in-house counsel to consult with various conservation partners throughout the country.
Jessica’s work includes conservation easement drafting, defense, enforcement, and stewardship, all with the goal of supporting the permanence of conservation easements. She serves as general counsel for and represents prominent holders in Colorado, including Aspen Valley Land Trust, Colorado Open Lands, Estes Valley Land Trust, Montezuma Land Conservancy, and Palmer Land Conservancy. Throughout her over nearly three decades in land conservation law, Jessica has facilitated hundreds of successful, enduring conservation transactions.
In addition to her legal practice, Ms. Jay publishes extensively on land conservation law topics and encourages thoughtful discussion and collaborative partnership through interactive presentations, workshops, and law courses.
Past Work Experience
Before starting her own land conservation law firm, Jessica practiced conservation, real estate, environmental, and appellate law with Isaacson, Rosenbaum P.C. Prior to that, she clerked for the Honorable Peter H. Ney of the Colorado Court of Appeals.
Educational Background
Ms. Jay received her Juris Doctor, magna cum laude and her Master of Studies in Environmental Law, summa cum laude from the Vermont Law and Graduate School. Here, she was the senior article editor for the Vermont Law Review, a semi-finalist and member of the Debevoise Moot Court Board, and a Dean’s Fellow who taught first-year legal writing. She received her undergraduate Bachelor of Arts degree from Bowdoin College, graduating magna cum laude with high honors in a coordinate major of government and environmental studies, and a minor in biology.
Innovating: Insuring Permanence in Land Conservation
Jessica’s seminal research and publication of approaches to land trust risk management nearly three decades ago provided the impetus for the establishment of the Terrafirma Risk Retention Group LLC. This captive insurance service led and designed by the Land Trust Alliance aims to provide defense and enforcement resources for land trusts, owning fee land and holding perpetual conservation easements.
Press Release:
The birth of Terrafirma is an historic moment for land conservation and is a creative response to a big national problem. In the late 1990s, Colorado Open Lands staff started asking a question that ultimately led to the creation of a new tool to help land trusts protect their conserved lands forever. How, they wondered, would they handle enforcement actions on their easements?
“It wasn’t any particular problem we ran into,” recalls Dan Pike, with Colorado Open Lands. “We just started asking what we would do if we ever had to go to court on our easements. And honestly, we didn’t have a good answer.” Contributing to the sense of urgency was a well-publicized case in which the French and Pickering Conservation Trust had incurred $125,000 in legal fees defending an easement.
“It was scary,” said Pike of the French and Pickering case. “Those numbers just shocked everybody.”
Pike asked Jessica Jay, then a first-year associate at a Denver law firm, to research easement enforcement options. “I went into it looking for a silver bullet,” recalls Jay. “And I came back to Dan with 18 options, half of which involved insurance.”
While Pike was less interested in insurance for Colorado Open Lands, Jay was captivated by the larger possibilities. “I realized that if land trusts approached the issue as a community, we’d have a critical mass to create our own insurance — something that worked for land trusts and their unique needs.”
Jay’s legal research published in 1999, made the rounds of the land trust community . . . and the rest is history.
Ms. Jay’s Current Projects and New Endeavors
Research
Jessica is currently researching how to inspire and incentivize new farmers’ and Indigenous access to and use of conserved lands. Her latest research focuses on what she has dubbed the “New Endeavors in Land Conservation” — community conservation, redevelopment, and undevelopment of our finite resource of land, borrowing and blending this with the mantra of reduce, reuse, and recycle land in order to create access to all people for clean, green, and healthy landscapes.
In these “New Endeavors in Land Conservation,” Jessicas considers conservation organizations to be the new social entrepreneurs leading the movement from large-scale, raw land protection to small-scale, community-based, interconnected re-purposing of land and its uses, in order to expand opportunities to benefit across all human systems and ecosystems.
Collaborative Efforts
Currently, Jessica collaborates with conservation organizations and landowners to:
Guidance
To help guide conservation professionals, easement holders, and landowners across the country, Jessica conducts national andregionals workshops and seminars on emerging and tried-and-true conservation topics and issues.
Teaching
Jessica currently teaches land conservation law at the Vermont Law and Graduate School and the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law. She aims to educate the next generation of land conservationists through these land conservation law courses, where she has authored the class textbook together with the Land Trust Alliance, developed the role-play exercises, and designed the asynchronous learning course.
She’d Love to Hear from You
To learn more about Conservation Law, P.C., Jessica E. Jay, Attorney at Law, please contact Jessica today. She will gladly address any questions you may have about potential land conservation projects. Jessica is also available to confer by phone for a free first consultation.