Allan Marks

President, Board of Water and Power Commissioners, LADWP

Allan provides strategic advice to companies, funds, investors, NGOs, and governments. He serves as President & Commissioner of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the United States’ largest municipal utility, and as an independent director for private funds. He advises and writes on improving the quality of investments, capital allocation, risk management, and public policy. Over the course of his career, he has handled complex energy and infrastructure transactions globally, developing innovative approaches to create value and reduce risk. A throughline of his work has been making the world a better place through clean, efficient, and reliable energy, transportation, water, digital networks, and other infrastructure critical to economic growth, sustainability, and resilience. He is a Senior Fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University’s Climate School and a Nonresident Visiting Senior Fellow at the NYU SPS Center for Global Affairs. He teaches law and finance at the UC Berkeley and UCLA Schools of Law and previously taught at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He is also a Distinguished Scholar in Energy Law & Sustainability and Professorial Lecturer in Law at GW Law. For more than 34 years as a lawyer at Milbank, he advised sophisticated, market-leading corporations, banks, institutional investors, and funds on their most challenging commercial and financial transactions, with an aggregate value exceeding $100 billion. Focused on project finance and development, his practice encompassed private equity, corporate strategy, joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, acquisition finance, capital markets, private placements, international and cross-border transactions, public-private partnerships, banking and regulatory matters, derivatives, construction and engineering, utilities, environmental permitting, technology, and a broad range of commercial matters.He is a Contributor to Forbes and frequently speaks on energy, infrastructure, climate, business strategy, public policy, and international transactions. His insights have been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, POLITICO Pro, CNN Business, Bloomberg, S&P Global Market Intelligence, and other media outlets. Earlier in his career, he interned with UNIDO’s Special Advisory Group on Energy in Vienna and served as an expert on a USAID team in India advising on energy sector reforms. Among the most rewarding aspects of his career have been building teams, mentoring others, and fostering collaboration across disciplines and cultures to develop practical solutions to complex challenges. He is driven by connecting the dots with creativity and insight—and by giving back as much as possible.