Trees, People, & the Law Symposium

The legal field can be confusing for anyone. This session explores the origins of the laws governing trees, examines ownership rights to trees, and looks at the duties, rights, and responsibilities of landowners, arborists, and municipalities to prevent injury to persons or property caused by trees.

Get advice for homeowners, arborists, and public entities regarding personal injury and property damage caused by trees, trespass, nuisance, and encroachments. Understand the many and varied issues involved in neighbor laws as they relate to trees and their care.

Get the latest cases and developing trends in tree-liability issues and learn from others’ experiences.

Learn your legal rights and responsibilities before contacting the insurance company. This session will also help you prepare to identify and challenge an insurance company that improperly rejects your claim.

Learn about the types of ordinances that municipalities can use to conserve and manage natural resources. These ordinances include street trees, zoning, subdivision/land development, landscape, tree preservation, and timber harvesting.

Investing in a community tree risk management program can save lives, reduce the catastrophic impacts of future storms on community budgets, and promote the health of urban forests. Most community urban forestry management plans state the need to remove high-risk trees on a priority basis but do not state how to specifically accomplish this goal. A tree risk management program fills this critical information gap and provides the community with a systematic approach to conducting cyclic tree risk inspections and initiating timely removal or corrective treatment for defective trees.

This session details the design and implementation of a proactive tree risk management program. This session gives government agencies the tools to develop a program to reduce the potential of harm from occurring by managing, rather than reacting to, hazard trees.

You’ll be introduced to the regulatory and non-regulatory tools that municipalities can use to conserve and manage natural resources. The basics of comprehensive land use planning and regulation will be discussed. Specific regulatory (zoning) and non-regulatory (developer incentives) techniques will be presented. A number of successful cases will be introduced and discussed.

Learn the qualifications, responsibilities, and importance of an expert witness in the court of law.