Chief Counsel
Caroline Ishida is chief counsel for the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission.
PUF: What is your role here?
Caroline Ishida: I oversee a legal team of eight Staff attorneys, one supervising attorney, and a legal assistant. We defend the Commission's decisions on appeal and represent the Commission and advise the Commissioners at hearings, as necessary.
We are also in charge of leading docket teams. Docket teams are groups of various experts from our audit, engineering, research, and compliance departments. They help us gather information and make decisions related to the dockets that we work on.
It's the attorney's job to run the docket team. We set up the internal schedule for the team members to prepare memos and other deliverables that go into drafting our decisions.
The attorneys do the initial draft of decisions that are then sent to the Commissioners, through me, for their review. The Commissioners can make changes and ask questions and provide input and edits to language.