Partner · New York · With the firm since 2013
Nathaniel Cobb
Leads the firm’s crisis and regulatory work in North America. Advises operators before licensing regulators, and companies whose equipment is in hospitals.
Nathaniel Cobb leads the firm’s crisis and regulatory work in North America from New York. He advises companies when a regulator, an inspector or a licensing body is about to decide something about them in public, and stays with them through the decision, the appeal and the years of compliance that usually follow.
Much of his recent work has been for operators of licensed autonomous systems and for companies whose equipment sits in hospitals: two kinds of client, he says, who share the experience of being judged on a sentence written by somebody else.
He joined the firm in 2013 and became a partner in 2015. Before that he was a reporter for eight years, covering regulation in Washington for a business news wire; spent six years as a spokesman for a federal financial regulator, where he wrote enforcement announcements; and ran the crisis practice of a New York communications firm for three years.
He grew up in Pittsburgh, studied history and economics in Ohio, and lives in Brooklyn. He rows, badly, on the Harlem River.
Selected experience
- Advising a medical device maker through a field safety notice affecting 1,140 hospital installations in the United States and Canada, 2022.
- Advising a hospital equipment lender after a nine-hour service interruption at a rural hospital, and through the questions from a state attorney general that followed, 2025.
- Advising a global industrial group on its North American communications after a licensing regulator revoked two licences, 2026, continuing.
Clients are not named. Matters are listed with the client’s agreement.
Speaking
Forthcoming
- Panellist, registry governance track. Citadel 2027, Vancouver waterfront, 13 to 15 April 2027. Session to be confirmed.
Recent
- When the licence is the story. A private briefing for general counsel of licensed operators, New York.
- Continuity, collections and the bedside: communicating about equipment in hospitals. An invited talk to a healthcare finance forum, Nashville.
- The first statement after a decision. A workshop for in-house lawyers, Toronto.
- Writing for the regulator who reads your press release. A panel for compliance officers, Chicago.