Mark Fogelman

Mark Fogelman is a partner at Friedman, Dumas & Springwater LLP. His practice focuses on civil, regulatory and appellate litigation with particular emphasis on the energy, telecommunications, and water industries, and related environmental issues. Mark has strong credentials in appellate litigation and is a member of the prestigious California Academy of Appellate Lawyers. He recently participated as a contributing author for the new edition of California Civil Writ Practice (C.E.B. 4th ed. 2008). Mark is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of Chicago Law School.

Before entering the private practice of law some ten years ago, Mark was an Assistant General Counsel at the California Public Utilities Commission, where he headed the practice group that defends all PUC decisions in state and federal courts. At the PUC, some of Mark's notable cases included California's appeal of the AT&T Divestiture to the U.S. Supreme Court; the Eighth Circuit cases that overturned the FCC's seminal orders construing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the appeal and oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in Pacific Gas & Elec. Co. v. PUC, 475 U.S. 1 (1986). He served as lead counsel in the hard-fought Mojave Pipeline case before the FERC, and successfully defended California against FERC assertions of jurisdiction in major cases in the Ninth and D.C. Circuits. Mark also successfully defended California's regulation of automatic dialing and announcing devices against First Amendment challenge in the federal district and appellate courts. Mark handled U.S. Supreme Court proceedings involving federal preemption of state trucking regulation and federal court proceedings preserving the sole line of railroad serving the North Coast of California, and was staff co-counsel before the CPUC in the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant rate case.

Prior to joining Friedman, Dumas & Springwater, Mark was a partner in the San Francisco office of the global law firm Reed Smith LLP. In 2006 he was recruited to Reed Smith from Steefel, Levitt & Weiss in San Francisco, where he was a shareholder and member of the Board at Directors. In private practice, Mark successfully prosecuted the lead case among a number of coordinated antitrust and unfair competition cases on behalf of seven corporate clients alleging that El Paso Corporation manipulated gas prices during the California Energy Crisis of 2000-2001 - a case which, along with the coordinated cases, resulted in the largest antitrust settlement in California history. He represented a large public utility in the PUC's investigation of price spikes at the California Border during the California Energy Crisis. He served as lead counsel for a large public utility in PUC proceedings establishing a new regulatory framework and rate structure for the Northern California natural gas industry. He was lead counsel in the successful settlement of an enforcement proceeding in which the prosecution staff of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board sought the largest civil penalty in California history for violation of waste discharge requirements under the Porter-Cologne Act. Mark represented the Navajo Nation in proceedings before the PUC seeking to obtain a $1.1 billion environmental upgrade of a power plant fueled by Navajo coal. He successfully defended and favorably settled an environmental enforcement action before the PUC against a telecommunications company alleged to have constructed a fiber optic network in violation of PUC environmental regulations. And after a one-month jury trial in federal court, Mark successfully obtained a jury verdict for a large natural gas consumer against a Texas energy company, which the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal selected as one of the "Top 10 Defense Verdicts of 2006."

Mark was recently elected 2010 President of the Conference of California Public Utility Counsel, and has frequently spoken and written on subjects related to energy, natural resources, climate change, water, regulated industries, and related legal issues. He was named a Northern California Super Lawyer in Energy & Natural Resources in 2006, 2007, 2008, and in the 2009 corporate counsel edition, and is included in the 2008, 2009 and 2010 editions of The Best Lawyers in America in the fields of communications law and appellate law.