Profile

Joseph C. Bell has over 30 years of regulatory and commercial experience in the energy field, domestically and internationally.

He has been involved in a wide variety of business and financial transactions, including project financing of energy facilities, and has been a leading regulatory advocate for the introduction of competition into the natural gas and electricity markets, representing one of the first entities to make market sales of natural gas in the interstate market and filing the first market-based tariff for electricity marketers in the United States. He also has considerable practical and legal experience with the international oil market.

In addition to his energy practice, Joe has been actively engaged in various aspects of privatization and institutional change in central Europe. In 1991, he established Hogan & Hartson’s Warsaw office. During that time, he was also active in Ukraine, and was a co-founder and member of the Advisory Board of the Project on Economic Reform in Ukraine. As part of his work in Central and Eastern Europe, he advised on a wide range of financial and commercial transactions, including some of the more important foreign investments in Poland. Most recently, Joe has been involved in oil policy and transparency issues in Africa.

Prior to joining Hogan & Hartson (merged with Lovells in 2010), Joe was assistant general counsel in the Federal Energy Administration responsible for international matters. He also was previously on the faculty at the Duke Law School and Duke University. Earlier, he was an attorney in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Justice Department and a staff member of the Cabinet Task Force on Oil Import Control.