James W. Tomlinson

Jim Tomlinson draws on his nearly 25 years of experience in the communications industry to help clients with a wide range of cable and telecommunications issues, including federal, state and local regulatory matters, programming network issues, and contract negotiation and enforcement. Jim’s clients include cable operators, broadband providers, wireless carriers, VoIP providers, competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and cable programming networks. As a former senior in-house counsel for an international telecommunications provider, Jim has extensive practical experience with commercial and regulatory legal issues for telecommunications clients. Prior to practicing law, Jim was a systems engineer, corporate account manager and network planner with a large telecommunications company, giving him an in-depth understanding of broadband networks and business issues facing communications companies.

One of Jim’s primary practice areas is pole attachments, where he advises cable television, telecommunications and wireless providers on outside plant deployment issues. Jim regularly performs complex pole attachment rate calculations and analysis. Jim has negotiated numerous pole attachment and conduit agreements and represents communications companies before the FCC and state regulatory agencies in regulatory litigation and rulemakings involving pole attachments.

In addition, Jim counsels his communications clients on a variety of antitrust and competition issues, including matters such as joint ventures, group purchasing, tying, resale price maintenance and trade association activities. He also counsels clients on premerger notifications to the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, having obtained agency clearance for numerous mergers and acquisitions, and has represented clients in responding to DOJ investigations.

Jim counsels competitive telecommunications, VoIP and broadband service providers on a wide range of telecommunications competition and broadband policy matters, including market entry, licensing and tariff obligations, commercial disputes, and subscriber privacy issues under federal and state communications law. His work in this area involves drafting subscriber agreements, privacy policies, acceptable use policies and other related documents for communications entities and other companies.

Jim also advises cable program networks on a wide variety of commercial and regulatory issues, such as closed captioning, program access and Internet and website matters.