All Appropriate Inquiry (AAI)

All Appropriate Inquiries, commonly expressed as All Appropriate Inquiry or “AAI,” is defined by ASTM and EPA (through CERCLA) as the process of conducting inquiry “into the previous ownership and uses of the subject property consistent with good commercial or customary practice…that will qualify a party to a commercial real estate transaction for one of the threshold criteria for satisfying the LLPs to CERCLA liability… and assuming compliance with other elements of the defense.” Essentially, conducting all appropriate inquiry consists of environmental due diligence conducted prior to a property transaction to determine whether a property may have been contaminated by past or current activities, in order for a user (for example, the prospective purchaser) to be exempt from liability for contamination that existed on a property prior to the property transaction.
The AAI obligation originated from the CERCLA or “Superfund” law of 1980, and was refined by several later laws: the Superfund Amendment and Reauthorization Act (SARA) in 1986; the Asset Conservation, Lender Liability and Deposit Insurance Protection Act in 1996; and the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act (“Brownfields Amendments”) in 2002. The most recent ruling regarding what constitutes AAI was decided in 2005 by the EPA’s Final Rule on All Appropriate Inquiries.