Mary G. Murphy

As the Golden State Warriors ride first place toward the NBA playoffs, Murphy represents the team in the California Environmental Quality Act analysis and project entitlements for the development of a new basketball court in San Francisco's Mission Bay area. The court is planned to exist within an Event Center alongside new mixed-use office and retail space. As with most large-scale urban planning efforts, opponents geared up to stop the project and announced they planned litigation. Murphy's challenge was to put the ball through the hoop.

She employed the new Assembly Bill 900 Environmental Leadership Project mechanism, put in place by Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature in 2011 to streamline CEQA challenges in developments exceeding $100 million that can be certified not to result in any net additional emissions of greenhouse gasses. The project must also create high-wage, highly skilled jobs that pay prevailing and living wages, provide construction jobs and permanent jobs for Californians and submit to monitoring and enforcement of all mitigation measures. In exchange, the law expedites judicial review of the project by sending any litigation immediately to the Court of Appeal.

"We worked with the Air Resources Board and the governor's office and got the certification" in late 2015, Murphy said, noting that the Warriors development was among the first to qualify under the new rules, along with Apple Inc.'s Campus 2 in Cupertino and a couple of solar power installations. "The Sacramento Kings used a version of it to build their new arena too," she said.

Murphy has been a major player in revitalizing San Francisco development. She served on San Francisco's host committee for Super Bowl 50, which engineered the successful bid to win the local venue for the game, then planned and executed related activities. She represented the developers who successfully negotiated to redevelop Treasure Island. And she was lead counsel to Stellar Management in its successful entitlement of the Parkmerced project. Treasure Island and Parkmerced represent two of the largest housing developments ever approved in San Francisco.

A long time basketball fan - she played junior varsity ball at Yale before going to law school at Harvard - Murphy gets to Warriors games when she can. She said working for a reigning championship club with the league's best record keeps her on her toes. "I have to admit I feel some of that pressure," she said. "They're such winners, and you want to match that."

? John Roemer