How Government Affairs, Regulatory, Legal, and Communications Should Coordinate During a Regulatory Proceeding

Internal coordination during a regulatory proceeding should produce one enterprise view without collapsing distinct professional responsibilities. The formal record, legal advice, stakeholder context, financial analysis, operational facts, public message, and executive decision must reconcile—but each requires a clear owner and governed system of record.

Download the Regulatory Proceeding Coordination RACI. This framework sits inside the Regulatory Proceeding Intelligence path and complements Regulatory Affairs vs. Government Affairs.

Design around authority, evidence, and decisions

For every workstream, identify the accountable decision-maker, responsible operator, required consultees, informed audiences, governing source, confidentiality class, deadline, and completion evidence. Avoid the false choice between silos and universal consensus. Coordination should bring the right evidence to the authorized decision on time. The NARUC proceedings manual is useful general background; actual roles must be assigned from the organization and proceeding.

The proceeding coordination RACI

Create a proceeding charter before the volume arrives

Define scope, requested or expected outcome, enterprise exposure, case lead, workstream owners, executive sponsor, decision thresholds, privilege and confidentiality approach, approved collaboration spaces, source-of-truth rules, meeting cadence, external-contact controls, and escalation path. Update the charter when the proceeding changes materially.

Use separate forums for control, decisions, and leadership

Route external signals through one triage standard

A filing, order, stakeholder statement, legislative proposal, public comment, media report, customer concern, or internal operational fact should be sourced, assessed for relevance and exposure, linked to the matter, assigned, and escalated only when material. The intelligence-to-action framework prevents alerts from becoming unmanaged email.

Approve external engagement before execution

For each proposed interaction, confirm objective, forum, participants, subject, restrictions, message, case coordination, authorized commitments, documentation, and follow-up. No functional owner should use a relationship to bypass Legal or the formal case strategy. No case owner should ignore relevant community or political context.

Reconcile testimony, stakeholder communication, and public messaging

Establish which filed or approved facts anchor communication, which claims require review, who answers stakeholder questions, how public statements are cleared, and how changes propagate. Consistency protects credibility; it does not require testimony, an executive brief, and a customer message to have identical detail.

Make executive decisions auditable

Record the decision, owner, date, options considered, recommendation, material evidence, dissent or uncertainty, effective timing, communication implications, and completion evidence. Avoid undocumented verbal decisions that later appear as unexplained shifts in testimony, spend, or stakeholder commitments.

Separate relationship acceptance from operational completion

The person who receives a request or makes an authorized assurance may not own fulfillment. Record both roles. Legal or Regulatory may need to validate language; Operations, Rates, Customer, Communications, or another function may complete the work; Government Affairs may maintain stakeholder follow-through.

Use linked systems of record

The docket and regulatory case system own formal documents and milestones. Legal owns privileged advice in approved tools. Finance and Rates own controlled analysis. Communications owns approved public material. The government affairs record owns stakeholders, interactions, institutional context, decisions, and commitments. Link rather than copy uncontrolled versions.

Review coordination failures without blame theater

Ask where a signal stalled, authority was unclear, facts diverged, restrictions arrived late, leadership lacked context, a promise had no owner, or a handoff failed. Assign an observable operating change, owner, due date, and proof. Feed material lessons into the annual strategy review.