Maureen Ohlhausen, once director of the Federal Trade Commission's Office of Policy Planning, will join Washington-based Wilkinson Barker Knauer as a partner effective Dec. 1, the communications and technology law firm announced today.
Ohlhausen, 47, will head the firm’s FTC practice, representing industry clients in matters relating to the agency. It’s a good time to bring her 11 years of FTC experience to private practice, she said, as the agency is recently reevaluating its privacy guidelines.
“Wilkinson really had a vision of how the FTC practice, compliance issues and consumer protection issues are becoming so intertwined with communications issues,” she said. “With technological convergence, a lot of these issues are cutting across jurisdictional boundaries (of government agencies).”
That’s a lesson Ohlhausen said she learned while heading the FTC Internet Access Task Force, which looked at net neutrality, broadband connectivity and wi-fi access, among other things. She said she will put her net neutrality expertise to immediate use at Wilkinson, giving clients and her colleagues guidance on the issue.
Ohlhausen started at the FTC in 1997 and from 2004 to 2008, she directed the Office of Policy Planning, which develops competition and consumer protection policy initiatives. She left the FTC in 2008 and became technology policy counsel at the Business Software Alliance, a trade group that represents the commercial software industry.
Ohlhausen earned her J.D. from George Mason University School of Law, where she is also an adjunct faculty member.





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