Spiegel & McDiarmid LLP

Spiegel & McDiarmid LLP was formed to represent the public side of our nation?s critical infrastructure industries, including energy and telecommunications. From the firm?s founding in 1967, our lawyers have sought to practice law in accordance with three very basic propositions:
Public sector and consumer-owned entities are entitled to legal representation of the highest quality, at a cost they can afford. No public agency or consumer-owned enterprise should be forced to operate from a position of weakness because of its legal representation.
In any technical area, lawyers should be conversant with more than just the fine points of the law. We must be able to communicate effectively with clients, expert witnesses, judges and others about highly technical matters.
Our clients are entitled to lawyers who approach problems with a broad perspective. Narrow thinking leads to narrow solutions, and narrow solutions are usually poor solutions.
Broad Perspective
Initially, the firm set out to apply these principles in the context of representing municipally owned and cooperative utility systems that found themselves at odds with private utility companies. In that arena, we found that the representation of municipal and cooperative systems ? which are often subject to strict limitations on their legal budgets ? required methods and approaches that would give clients the greatest return on their legal dollar. The firm has since broadened this approach to include representation in telecommunications and transportation.

Creative Legal Strategies
This recognition has led us to put a premium on creative legal strategies ? for example: seeking relief for clients in unexpected venues, and forcing regulatory agencies to expand the scope of their review in the context of otherwise routine proceedings.

Today, we work to ensure that our public clients can adapt and thrive in the ever-changing business and regulatory environment. By adopting novel approaches to our clients? legal problems, we have been successful in achieving more effective results at a lower cost than if a purely conventional course had been taken.

History
Spiegel & McDiarmid LLP began in 1967 when George Spiegel (1919?1997) decided to establish a law practice to champion consumers, communities and cooperatives in protecting their rights against private utility companies. The publicly owned power systems that Spiegel chose to represent could often benefit their communities and promote economic development by charging lower rates to their residents and businesses than the neighboring for-profit utilities. In many cases, the for-profit utilities did not appreciate the competition and used their ownership and control of the electric transmission lines and gas pipelines (and other anti-competitive tactics) to deprive the smaller public systems of an equal opportunity to compete for resources and services.

Growth and Success in Federal Courts
In 1970, George recruited Bob McDiarmid, who had been an appellate lawyer in the Justice Department and Assistant to the General Counsel of what is now FERC. Together, George and Bob and their expanding firm were soon involved in strategically changing the landscape of the utility industry in the United States, primarily by introducing antitrust concepts to the energy regulation field. Successful appeals in the federal courts, including three seminal decisions of the Supreme Court, established the principle that then-reluctant federal agencies, such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission (and their predecessors), had to consider competitive circumstances and consequences in their regulation of electric and gas businesses. They promoted a ?small utility bill of rights? to establish the rights of publicly owned utilities to obtain access to monopoly-controlled infrastructure facilities and effectively participate in the emerging energy marketplace. Over time, the markets and regulatory structures have become more sophisticated and complex, but the need to guard against anti-competitive exercise of market power remains.

Locations	No. of Attorneys
Washington, DC	24

Practice Areas	No. of Attorneys
Environmental and Land Use	12
Litigation - General (consumer)	20
Telecommunications	9