|
Mr. Cohen is Counsel in the firm. He represents entities in both the electric and natural gas industries. Mr. Cohen is an experienced attorney with over sixteen years experience in public utility regulation, energy and telecommunications law. Mr. Cohen's work with the firm has centered around ensuring that the interests of publicly owned electric utilities are protected in the Standard Market Design Design rulemaking and other dockets involving the efforts of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to facilitate competitive wholesale electricity markets.From 1988 through 2002, Mr. Cohen led a wide variety of efforts for the Ohio Consumers' Counsel, the statutory representative of the residential consumers of the residential consumers of Ohio's investor-owned utilities. These efforts included utility applications for rate increases of hundreds of millions of dollars and supervising other attorneys in litigating such cases. As Assistant Legal Director, he shared responsibility for the entire operation of the Legal Division, which included thirteen attorneys and a total of twenty employees.In 1993 Mr. Cohen was appointed Interim Consumers' Counsel by the Governing Board of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel and managed all operations of the Office of the Consumers' Counsel, a state agency with approximately sixty employees.In 1997 Mr. Cohen became Assistant Consumers' Counsel in Ohio. In this capacity, Mr. Cohen was responsible for a wide variety of litigation and other efforts, including representing the interests of residential consumers in various regulatory and industry forums addressing the introduction of competition into the electric, natural gas and telecommunications industries.Some of Mr. Cohen's many accomplishments include negotiating changes to the conditions of a utility's divestiture of its transmission system, preventing the utility from exercising control post-divestiture; representation of the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates in a brief before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals challenging stranded cost recovery provisions of FERC Order No. 888; convincing the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to order automatic enrollment for a phone company's low income program, resulting in an enrollment increase of more than 100 percent; and arguing before a state appellate court regarding the effect of introducing competition on the Consumers' Counsel's jurisdiction over complaints against gas marketers. | 