Market · Digital infrastructure
Data center counsel in Columbus Ohio.
New Albany has been building data centers since 2010. What changed in 2025 is not the pace of construction but the shape of the contract behind it: Ohio turned the connection into a twelve-year obligation with a credit test, a ramp schedule and an exit fee. A company that reads that as a closing will staff for the wrong decade.
Signed is not served, and served is not finished.
Signing an electric service agreement in Ohio does not end a data center project; it starts a twelve-year obligation with a credit test attached. Of the 250 structured interviews in Sartori's Columbus cohort, 96 sat with lawyers inside corporate legal departments at operators, developers, utilities and their suppliers, and across the 24 months to June 2026, 71 of those 96 said a campus their department had treated as closed came back to them at least three times after the connection agreement was signed. Pick the lens that matches the file on your desk this quarter.
As of 12 February 2026 AEP Ohio reported 17,861 MW of data center load under binding contract, scheduled to arrive progressively through 2035. Peak demand across every customer it serves has historically run between 8,000 and 10,500 MW. A pipeline, not a meter reading.
Each lens is developed below. A company weighing whether to buy data center counsel in Columbus Ohio as a hire or as an instruction should start with where the seat sits today.
- 17,861 MW
- Data center load under binding contract, arriving through 2035Contracted capacity, not energized load
- AEP Ohio update to PUCO, 13 February 2026
- 23 Jul 2025
- Schedule DCT effective, after the PUCO order of 9 July 2025Case No. 24-508-EL-ATA
- AEP Ohio Data Center Tariff page
- Q4 2031
- Earliest reliable service date published for the studied loadA second Central Ohio cluster is gated to 2033
- AEP Ohio load study letter, 7 November 2025
- 14 Aug 2025
- House Bill 15 in force: siting clock and self-supply widenedOhio Power Siting Board decision within 150 days of completeness
- Ohio General Assembly, 136th GA
One utility published four numbers, and only one of them is electricity.
The single most common error in a board paper about Ohio is a merged megawatt figure. AEP Ohio publishes an inquiry number, a study number, a contract number and a system peak, and they describe four different legal states of the same pipeline.
Start with what the utility actually said. In an update filed with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and released on 13 February 2026, AEP Ohio reported that as of 12 February 2026 data centers and their developers had signed binding contracts for 5,642 MW under Schedule DCT, on top of 12,219 MW of data center contracts signed before the tariff existed — 17,861 MW in total, arriving progressively through 2035. In the same document the company noted that expressions of interest before the tariff had exceeded 30,000 MW, that 13,022.7 MW of that interest went on to request and pay for a formal engineering study, and that peak demand across all of its customers — homes, factories, offices and existing large loads together — has historically ranged between about 8,000 and 10,500 MW.
Those four figures are not four estimates of one quantity. An expression of interest is a conversation. A paid load study is an engineering request with a fee attached and no obligation on either side. A signed agreement is a contract with collateral behind it and a ramp schedule in it. A system peak is a measurement of electricity that actually flowed. A general counsel who writes that Ohio has seventeen gigawatts of data center demand has said something the utility did not say, and a state regulator, a consumer advocate or an intervening manufacturer will correct it in a filing.
The gap between the numbers is the whole commercial story, and it is why this is a hiring question rather than a procurement question. If 17,861 MW were already energized, the legal work would be operational: leases, service tickets, occasional disputes. Because the figure is contractual and arrives over nine years, almost all of the legal work is still ahead of the company, and it is the kind that recurs on a schedule someone else set. The 12,219 MW signed before the tariff and the 5,642 MW signed under it are also governed by different paper, which means a company holding both is administering two contract regimes across the same campuses.
There is a second, quieter distinction in the same release. The 13,022.7 MW that paid for a study did not become 5,642 MW because projects failed. It shrank because the tariff imposed a signature window: once the study results landed, customers had a fixed period in which to sign a letter of agreement or an electric service agreement, and the ones that could not put collateral or a sponsor behind the commitment inside that window fell out. That is a credit event dressed as an engineering process, and it happened to a majority of the megawatts in the queue.
Interest, studies, contracts and metered load are four legal states of one pipeline. A company that adds them has invented a number the utility declined to publish.
Ohio wrote the connection as a term contract with a credit test.
Read Schedule DCT as a legal department would read a facility agreement rather than as an engineer would read a tariff. It has a term, a minimum, a security package, a change-of-control problem and a break fee, and each of those is a file with a date on it.
On 9 July 2025 the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio adopted a settlement in Case No. 24-508-EL-ATA, directed the utility to file data center specific tariffs and ordered the end of a moratorium on new data center connections. The compliance tariff followed on 11 July 2025 and Schedule DCT became effective on 23 July 2025. The commission chose between two competing packages, and the one it adopted was the one filed by the utility, commission staff and the Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel rather than the one filed by an industry group of operators and suppliers. That procedural fact matters to a legal department more than the rate does: it establishes that in this state the terms on which a campus takes power are settled in a contested proceeding, and that a company which is not a party takes the result.
The terms themselves are the reason the file recurs. Service under the schedule is triggered at 25,000 kW, with new loads at affiliated entities aggregated so a portfolio cannot be split below the threshold. Step one is a formal load study, priced at $10,000, $50,000 or $100,000 depending on the megawatt band. What follows is a load ramp of no more than four years with contractual floors, an initial term of that ramp plus a further eight years, and a minimum-demand obligation set at 85 percent.
The security package is where an in-house department earns its salary. Collateral is set at 50 percent of the total minimum charges for the entire term — a number computed against a decade of obligations, not against a monthly bill — unless the customer, or a financial sponsor co-signing with it, holds ratings of A- from Standard & Poor's and A3 from Moody's and holds cash and equivalents above ten times the collateral amount. Surety bonds are not accepted. A head of legal at a colocation platform put the consequence to us plainly: the credit test, not the megawatts, decided which of the platform's campuses could be financed on its own balance sheet and which needed a sponsor guarantee, and that determination had to be refreshed every time the sponsor's own rating moved.
The exit terms complete the shape. A customer may assign capacity to another tariff customer, but only up to 25 percent of the contract and only where the assignment is electrically feasible and shifts no stranded cost. A contractual exit exists, but the fee is 36 months of minimum charges and it does not become available until after the fifth year following the ramp. Between signature and that date — which for a campus signing in 2026 is most of a decade — the company is holding a fixed obligation and the only levers it has are legal ones.
A connection eventA term obligation
- The study A fee, an engineering request and a place in a queue. Nothing is owed by either side, and a company can walk away from it without a legal consequence.
- The signature window A fixed period in which a letter of agreement or a service agreement has to be executed, with collateral or a co-signing sponsor behind it. Most of the studied megawatts did not survive this step.
- The term A ramp with annual floors, a minimum-demand exposure, a security package that moves with the sponsor’s credit, an assignment cap and a break fee that only unlocks years later.
| Obligation | What the tariff sets | When it returns |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum demand | The greater of 85 percent of the highest billing demand in the prior eleven months, or a size-based floor that cannot exceed 85 percent of contract capacity | Every billing month, for the whole term |
| Load ramp | No more than four years, with floors of 50, 65, 80 and 90 percent of contract capacity in years one to four | Annually, until the ramp completes |
| Initial term | The ramp period plus a further eight years of service | Once, at signature - and it decides the horizon of everything else |
| Collateral | Fifty percent of total minimum charges for the full term, unless the customer and any co-signing financial sponsor clear the tariff credit test | On every rating action, sponsor change or balance-sheet event |
| Exit | An exit fee of thirty-six months of minimum charges, available only after the fifth year following the ramp | Whenever a capacity plan changes before that date |
| Assignment | Capacity may be assigned to another tariff customer up to a quarter of the contract, subject to electrical feasibility | On every portfolio rebalance across campuses |
The utility published a service date, and the campuses built around it.
Most markets argue about interconnection timing in the abstract. Ohio has a letter, dated, addressed to customers who had already paid for their studies, that puts a year on it.
On 7 November 2025 AEP Ohio issued the load study letter that closed step two of the tariff process. It reported that 36 sites totaling 13,022.7 MW had been studied, 32 of them and 9,807.7 MW in Central Ohio, and that AEP Transmission, applying reliability planning standards against a PJM regional case, had concluded that none of that load could be served reliably until a specific PJM project — a 765 kV line from Greentown, Indiana to a Central Ohio substation, with associated 345 kV work — or a comparable regional solution was in service, estimated for the fourth quarter of 2031. A second Central Ohio cluster was placed behind a further regional upgrade planned for 2033.
Read that as a corporate lawyer rather than as a planner. It converts a commercial assumption into a dated, published constraint, and it does so on the utility's own letterhead, which means every counterparty in the chain now has the same document. A construction schedule that assumed grid power in 2028 is not merely optimistic; it is inconsistent with a filing the company's own supplier has made. Contracts drafted against the earlier assumption — equipment orders, offtake arrangements, tenant commitments, financing covenants — each need to be read against a date the company did not choose.
Ohio's legislature had already supplied the alternative. Substitute House Bill 15 took effect on 14 August 2025. It put the Ohio Power Siting Board on a statutory clock — completeness review in 45 days and a decision within 150 days of completeness, with failure to act operating as approval — and it rewrote the rules on self-supply, creating a mercantile customer self-power system that can serve a large commercial member behind the meter, on land the member or the operator owns or controls or on adjacent land, without using the utility's wires. It also allowed third parties to own and operate that generation under lease or power purchase arrangements.
The effect inside the New Albany business park was immediate and is on the Ohio Power Siting Board's record. A behind-the-meter gas plant of 120 MW serving a colocation operator's own campus was certificated on 24 July 2025 in Case No. 25-0090-EL-BLN, expressly not connected to the grid. A second plant of 216 MW, with battery storage alongside it, was approved on 20 November 2025. A separate 200 MW behind-the-meter plant serving a hyperscale campus in the same park was approved in June 2025. Each of those is a generation asset, an air authorization, a fuel supply arrangement and a set of easements, sitting on the balance sheet of a company that describes itself as a data center business.
That is the structural change a general counsel should be staffing against. A company that six years ago bought electricity now owns generation, and the legal capabilities that follow — siting certificates, curtailment obligations, gas supply, interconnection to its own campus rather than to the grid — are not adjacent to the tariff file. They are a second recurring file, opened because the first one had a date on it.
A supplier that puts a service year in writing has changed every contract downstream of it. The schedule is now a document, and documents get read in disputes.
Entitlement is not the recurring cost here. The pad file is.
New Albany made data centers easy to build and kept them hard to build repeatedly. The use is permitted rather than conditional in the district that matters, so the fight a company expects never happens - and the file it does not expect arrives every time it pours a new foundation.
Under the City of New Albany's Codified Ordinances, general office activities and data centers are a permitted use in the General Employment district and a conditional use in Limited Industrial, and data center is a defined term in the code rather than an interpretation someone has to argue for. Maximum lot coverage in those districts is 75 percent and the required distance from a residential district is 50 feet. Off-site noise is not measured against a decibel cap; the code tests it against the average intensity of street traffic noise in the nearest residential districts, with an independent engineering survey available if the point is disputed. The city reports four operational noise complaints over more than fifteen years of data center operation.
A company arriving from a market where a rezoning is the whole battle will read that and conclude the land-use work is done. It is not; it has been moved. Because the use is permitted, the recurring instrument is the final development plan, approved building by building by the Planning Commission under Chapter 1159. The approval of 15 December 2025 is the template: a 16.81-acre pad carrying a two-story data center of about 330,000 square feet, approved 5-0, on an underlying planned unit development from 2008, after a height variance from 45 feet to 55 feet had been granted separately on 20 October 2025.
The detail worth taking from that record is on the staff checklist rather than in the vote. The Planning Commission's evaluation expressly asks whether the Ohio EPA's section 401 certification or isolated wetland permit and the Army Corps of Engineers' section 404 or nationwide permit are required and in hand. Environmental clearance is therefore a municipal finding in New Albany, not a parallel track a company can run quietly on its own schedule, and it is asked afresh for each plan.
The federal and state water instruments moved in the same window. Ohio EPA finalized its section 401 certification for the 2026 nationwide permits on 16 December 2025; the Corps published the permits on 8 January 2026 with an effective period running from 15 March 2026 to 15 March 2031; and Ohio regional conditions were public-noticed on 11 March 2026. New Albany sits in the Huntington District, whose regional conditions are not interchangeable with a neighboring district's. Where the Corps declines jurisdiction, Ohio's isolated wetland program picks the feature up, with a general permit for Category 1 or 2 features of half an acre or less carrying a 30-day review and individual permits running to 90 or 180 days. A section 401 application gets a completeness review inside 15 business days under Ohio law.
Two more instruments recur per pad rather than per campus. Construction stormwater coverage under Ohio EPA's general permit — effective 23 April 2023 and running to 22 April 2028 — is required for any disturbance of an acre or more, which includes a substation pad, with a notice of intent fee of $200 plus $20 per whole disturbed acre above five, capped at $500. And air construction permitting sits on the critical path: no emissions unit may be built before a permit to install is issued, with 18 months to commence construction from issuance, generators of 50 horsepower or less permanently exempt, and a permit-by-rule route for larger emergency units held under 500 hours a year.
The one that changed most recently is wastewater. Ohio EPA public-noticed a draft general permit for data center discharges on 31 October 2025, held its hearing on 17 December 2025 and accepted comments through 16 January 2026, and then confirmed in a community notice of 21 July 2026 that it would not be finalized. Companies that had planned around a five-year general permit are back on individual permits, which are site-specific, slower and open to public comment. That reversal is itself the argument of this page in miniature: a legal department staffed for a one-time authorization now needs capacity for a recurring, contested one.
| Instrument | Issuing body | What triggers it | Repeats per |
|---|---|---|---|
| Final development plan | New Albany Planning Commission, Chapter 1159 | Each new building on an approved pad | Per building |
| Section 404 and section 401 clearance | USACE Huntington District and Ohio EPA; 2026 nationwide permits effective 15 March 2026 | Any disturbance of jurisdictional waters on the pad | Per pad |
| Isolated wetland permit | Ohio EPA, R.C. 6111.02 to 6111.028 | A feature the Corps declines to take jurisdiction over | Per feature |
| Construction stormwater coverage | Ohio EPA general permit OHC000006, expiring 22 April 2028 | Disturbance of one acre or more, including substation pads | Per disturbance |
| Air permit to install | Ohio EPA Division of Air Pollution Control, OAC 3745-31 | Generator fleets above the permit-by-rule thresholds | Per emissions unit |
| Process water discharge | Ohio EPA individual NPDES, after the draft general permit was dropped in July 2026 | Cooling-tower blowdown or non-contact cooling water to a stream | Per outfall |
| Siting certificate | Ohio Power Siting Board, on the House Bill 15 clock | On-site generation or storage serving the campus | Per plant and per amendment |
| Abatement agreement | City of New Albany Community Reinvestment Area, with state designation for a mega-project | Each new investment package, struck before construction | Per package |
Settled once for the campusReopened for every building
- The district Zoning text, permitted-use tables and the business park’s standards. Settled years before the company arrived, and the reason the expected land-use fight never materialises.
- The plan A final development plan for a specific pad, with the commission asking afresh whether federal and state water clearance is required and held. Approved building by building.
- The pad file Stormwater coverage, an air authorization for the generator fleet, a wetland determination and, where cooling water reaches a stream, an individual discharge permit. Opened again with each foundation.
The work is in Licking County. The seat is usually somewhere else.
Read the requisitions rather than the practice pages. Across the in-house postings reviewed for this article in August 2026, the Columbus-sited legal seats belong to the utility, to an engineering prime and to an equipment manufacturer. The companies filling the business park advertise their legal seats on the coasts.
The New Albany International Business Park runs to about 12,000 acres, roughly 9,000 of them inside city limits, and it straddles the Franklin and Licking county line. City figures reported in May 2026 put 40 data centers in operation there with 28 more planned or under construction across 15 businesses. One operator alone invested $6.2 billion in Licking County between 2015 and 2024 and paid $3.1 million in property taxes and fees there in 2024, on figures the city published with the company in August 2025. That is a dense, permanent, legally intensive cluster by any measure.
Now read where the lawyers are advertised. A regulated utility advertised an associate general counsel for transactions at its Columbus headquarters, on site five days a week, requiring ten or more years and eligibility to practice in Ohio, covering acquisitions and divestitures, new construction, joint ventures and customer-facing transactions with regulatory coordination, on a posting that closed 29 July 2026. An engineering and construction prime advertised a large projects counsel in Columbus for engineer-procure-construct work in electric power, requiring five to ten years. A data center equipment manufacturer headquartered in the Columbus metro advertised a commercial counsel for its sales agreements, requiring a minimum of six years. Three Columbus seats, three different sides of the same buildings.
The operators are elsewhere. A hyperscale operator's senior corporate counsel for construction — the seat that negotiates design and construction contracts for its data centers across the Americas — was advertised in Arlington. Its real estate and entitlements seat, covering land acquisitions, leases and zoning entitlement work for worldwide data center expansion, was advertised in New York and Seattle. Its environmental and sustainable design counsel, advising from site selection through construction and operations and engaging regulators and local officials on data center developments, was advertised in Seattle. A colocation platform's construction and procurement counsel seats sit at its own headquarters in Kansas. No public requisition reviewed for this article put a hyperscale operator's in-house legal seat in Columbus or New Albany.
That arrangement is entirely defensible while the work is a build. A national construction desk is more efficient than seven local ones, and Ohio-specific tariff, siting, land-use and incentives work is genuinely bought well from Columbus firms. It becomes a structural problem at the point the file stops being a build. An annual minimum-demand exposure, a collateral position that moves with a sponsor's credit rating, a state proceeding whose outcome sets the terms, a permit that resets per pad and a generation asset the company now owns are not project work. They are the standing obligations of a business unit, and the decision about what position the company takes on any of them cannot be delegated to counsel outside the company.
Sartori's Columbus interview cohort reads the same way from the inside. Of the 96 respondents holding in-house seats at operators, developers, utilities and suppliers within that cohort, 58 told us over the 24 months to June 2026 that their department had no named internal owner for the utility contract behind a campus it had already energized, and 34 of those 58 said the tariff terms were first read closely by their department only after a commercial dispute had opened. The instrument is not obscure. It is published, and it is nobody's job.
| Buyer | Where the seat sits | Label on the requisition | How often the file returns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regulated utility | In-house, Columbus headquarters, on site five days a week | Transactions, new construction and customer-facing agreements | Continuously - it writes the agreements the rest of the market signs |
| Hyperscale operator | National desks advertised in Arlington, New York and Seattle | Construction; real estate and entitlements; environmental | Per campus, from a book that spans the Americas |
| Colocation platform | In-house at the operator, outside Ohio | Construction and energy procurement; commercial contracts | Per hall, with project-finance support attached |
| Behind-the-meter developer | Developer in-house, with Ohio siting counsel instructed | Energy regulatory and power siting; easements and rights of way | Per plant, per amendment and per gas lateral |
| Engineering and construction prime | In-house, Columbus | Large projects: EPC, design-build and master service agreements | Per project and per renewal cycle |
| Equipment manufacturer | In-house, Columbus metro | Commercial contracts and sale-of-goods work | Per order book, continuously |
| Infrastructure fund | Instructed out; no Ohio legal seat on the public record | Acquisition and portfolio work at the fund level | At transaction events only |
What a general counsel told us about the second campus
A general counsel at a developer-operator with two Central Ohio campuses described the moment the shape became obvious, and it had nothing to do with a dispute. The company had run its first campus through construction with a national construction desk and excellent Columbus counsel on the local instruments, and considered the matter closed when the building energized. The second campus reopened everything at once: a different contract vintage on the utility side, a fresh set of pad-level authorizations, and a collateral calculation that had moved because the sponsor behind it had. Nobody internally had been carrying the first campus's paper, so the second one was priced as though it were the first. Separately, a head of legal at a supplier into the same park told us the harder problem was cadence rather than complexity — the department could do any one of these files well, and could not do four of them in the same quarter with the people it had.
A national construction desk can build anything. It cannot be the company that decides what position Ohio hears, because that decision is not construction work.
The disclosed ceiling in Columbus belongs to the utility.
Advertised bands make an unusual comparison available in this market. The company that writes the agreements publishes what it pays the lawyer who writes them, and it is more than the operators publish for the lawyers who sign them.
The Columbus in-house band reviewed here is the regulated utility's, and it is the highest local figure in the set: $221,489 to $287,934 for an associate general counsel covering transactions, new construction and customer-facing agreements, on site five days a week at the Columbus headquarters, requiring ten or more years and eligibility to practice in Ohio, on a posting that closed 29 July 2026. That seat is the counterparty on the agreements every campus in the park signs.
The operator-side bands are national and mostly lower at the ceiling. A hyperscale operator advertised construction counsel for its data center program across the Americas at $183,100 to $247,700 in Arlington, requiring ten or more years; environmental and sustainable design counsel at $153,900 to $208,200 in Seattle, requiring five or more; and real estate and entitlements counsel for worldwide data center expansion at $144,700 to $195,700 in New York and $131,500 to $178,000 in Seattle, requiring two or more. The Columbus firm option prices lowest of all at entry: an energy and utilities associate covering Ohio Power Siting Board and Public Utilities Commission of Ohio work, requiring two or more years, was advertised at $145,000 to $165,000 in August 2026.
Two conclusions follow for a company pricing this seat. The first is that the Ohio-specific capability is not what the national market pays a premium for, which means a company that wants it locally is competing against a utility rather than against the coasts. The second is that the entry-level firm band is low enough that building the capability by developing a junior lawyer is a genuine option here in a way it is not in more expensive markets — provided somebody senior owns the file while that happens.
Columbus firm, energy and utilities associate
Ohio Power Siting Board and Public Utilities Commission of Ohio work, two or more years, advertised August 2026. The instructed option, priced at entry.
Law firm posting, August 2026What our own telemetry says about filling it
We have worked the Columbus in-house market for 5 years, for operators, developers, utilities and the manufacturers and contractors that supply them. Sartori's Columbus mandate telemetry covers 15 closed in-house searches over the trailing three years, 93 percent of them completed, at a typical timeline of 4 to 7 months, with counter-offer incidence at 32 percent and a median of 16 working days between offer and signature. Within that set, 6 were digital-infrastructure seats scoped around a single campus, and 4 of those six came back to us inside eighteen months for a second hire covering work the first requisition had not named.
The uncomfortable numbers are in the same set. 2 of the 15 did not complete at all. In 3 of the six campus-scoped searches the fault was ours as much as the client's: we opened on a brief that described a building and did not describe which of the recurring instruments the seat would own, and a candidate who is being asked to hold a decade-long contract does not accept a job description written around a construction schedule. We now decline to open this search until that question is answered in writing, which costs a fortnight at the start. There is also a limit to what our own data sees here: this market creates far more of these seats by internal move than by advertisement, and a mapping exercise reads an unadvertised promotion as an absence.
Two engagements, anonymized
A colocation platform with a Central Ohio campus approached us in the second half of 2025 with a requisition for senior counsel, construction. Three weeks of scoping turned it into a seat that owned the utility agreement, the collateral position and the siting file for the on-site generation the company had by then decided to build, reporting to the general counsel. The search ran 5 months from settled brief to signature and the successful candidate came from a state regulatory background rather than from a construction practice. Separately, a manufacturer supplying equipment into the park asked us for a commercial contracts lawyer and, on the evidence of its own order book, ended up hiring for procurement and regulatory exposure instead. That search took 7 months, at the top of our stated band, because the brief changed twice before it settled.
Name the instrument the seat owns before you name the campus.
Nearly every failure in this search is decided before a candidate is approached. A requisition that names a building produces two shortlists and one disappointed hire; a requisition that names an obligation produces a short list of people who have carried one.
The scoping conversation that works here is short and uncomfortable. It asks which of the recurring instruments this seat will own outright: the utility agreement and the collateral position behind it; the state proceedings that set the terms; the pad-level environmental file; the on-site generation, if the company has any; the incentives agreements and their compliance obligations; or the construction program. Most companies answer “all of them” and then discover that is two seats, or one seat and a panel. Either answer is fine. Not answering is what produces a nine-month search.
The second question is the reporting line, and it is not a formality in this market. A lawyer who owns an obligation that runs into the mid-2030s and is refreshed against a credit rating cannot report into a function that escalates on a quarterly cycle. Candidates read the reporting line as the answer to whether the seat is real, and they read it before they read the compensation band. Where a company has a chief legal officer rather than a general counsel with a narrower remit, the practical test is the same: the holder of this file has to be able to reach that person inside a week.
Scope the obligation, not the asset. The building will be finished long before the contract behind it is.
- Name the owner of the agreement. Somebody has to be accountable for the utility contract, the minimum-demand exposure and the collateral position. If nobody is named, the answer defaults to whoever is nearest when something breaks.
- Separate the build from the term. Construction and procurement work is real, well paid and staffed elsewhere. Asking one requisition to cover both a construction program and a decade-long regulated obligation produces two shortlists.
- Decide the state posture early. Terms in this market are settled in contested proceedings. A company that never intervenes still takes the outcome, and that is a choice worth making deliberately rather than by absence.
- Ask what the campus already owns. On-site generation converts a purchaser of electricity into an owner of an asset with siting, fuel and curtailment obligations. That belongs in the job description, not in the first week.
- Budget four to seven months, and start counting from the day the brief settles rather than the day the requisition opens.
The question is not what the work is. It is whether the work is yours or somebody else’s to hand you.
- Ask who reads the tariff today. If the answer is an external adviser on instruction, you are being hired to create a capability rather than to run one, which is a stronger offer if it is said out loud.
- Ask about the second campus. A company on its first build has not yet met the recurrence. A company on its third has, and will describe the seat far more accurately.
- Test the reporting line. An obligation that runs a decade needs an escalation path that runs in days. If the seat sits under a commercial function, ask how a filing deadline gets escalated.
- Value the state record. Experience in front of a state utility commission or a siting board is the credential this market is short of, and it does not substitute with volume of transactional work.
- Explore quietly. A confidential conversation commits nothing. Our guide on moving in-house covers how these seats are usually created.
Written around a buildingWritten around an obligation
- The project brief Senior counsel, construction, for a named campus. Fills quickly from a deep pool, and describes work that finishes on a date the company already knows.
- The blended brief Construction plus “regulatory as needed”. Two candidate pools priced differently, one requisition, and a hire who is excellent at half of it.
- The obligation brief A named owner for the agreement, the security package, the state posture and the authorizations that reset per pad, with the construction program instructed or staffed separately.
- Q1 Can one named person say what your minimum-demand exposure is this year? If the answer is finance, and finance says legal → the first hire owns the agreement, not the building.
- Q2 Does the company own generation, or is it about to? If yes → siting, fuel and curtailment obligations belong in the job description before the offer, not after it.
- Q3 Is the environmental file resourced per pad or per campus? If per campus → the department is one final development plan away from discovering the difference.
- → All three answered? Open a confidential, targeted search — and keep the instructed relationships, because the internal seat directs them rather than replacing them.
Common questions about hiring in-house counsel for Ohio data center work
Who actually hires data center counsel in Columbus Ohio, and where does the seat sit?
Three employers hire locally; the largest operators mostly do not. The Columbus-sited in-house requisitions reviewed for this article in August 2026 belong to the regulated utility, to an engineering and construction prime, and to a data center equipment manufacturer in the Columbus metro. The hyperscale operators building in the New Albany business park carry their construction, real-estate and environmental legal work on national desks advertised in Arlington, New York and Seattle, and buy the Ohio-specific tariff, siting, land-use and incentives work from Columbus firms. That is the structural fact behind most of this page: the recurring file is in Licking and Franklin counties, and the people who own it are usually not.
We signed our electric service agreement. What legal work is genuinely still ahead?
Roughly a decade of it. Schedule DCT, effective 23 July 2025, sets an initial term of the ramp plus eight years, so a campus that signs in 2026 is inside its first contract until the mid-2030s. Inside that term: an annual minimum-demand exposure at 85 percent, collateral of 50 percent of total minimum charges unless the customer and any co-signing sponsor clear the tariff’s credit test, an exit fee of 36 months of minimum charges that only becomes available after the fifth year past the ramp, and a cap of 25 percent on assigning capacity to another tariff customer. Every one of those is a legal instrument with a date on it.
How long does an Ohio campus wait for utility power, and what does the legal department do about it?
The published answer is Q4 2031, and the answer to the second question is generation. In its load study letter of 7 November 2025, AEP Ohio reported that AEP Transmission had studied 36 sites totaling 13,022.7 MW and concluded that none of it could be served reliably until PJM project 2025W1-570 or a comparable regional solution, estimated for the fourth quarter of 2031, with a second Central Ohio cluster gated to a 2033 upgrade. Ohio’s answer arrived three months earlier: House Bill 15, effective 14 August 2025, put the Ohio Power Siting Board on a statutory clock and widened behind-the-meter self-generation, which is why gas plants are now certified inside the business park.
What is a company paying for this seat in Columbus in 2026?
The disclosed Columbus in-house ceiling reviewed here is $287,934. A regulated utility advertised an associate general counsel for transactions at its Columbus headquarters at $221,489 to $287,934, five days a week on site, requiring ten or more years and Ohio eligibility, on a posting that closed 29 July 2026. Against that, a hyperscale operator’s construction counsel seat covering the Americas advertised $183,100 to $247,700 in Arlington in 2026, and a Columbus firm advertised an energy and utilities associate covering Ohio Power Siting Board and Public Utilities Commission of Ohio work at $145,000 to $165,000 in August 2026. The local ceiling is on the utility side of the table.
Do we need data center recruiters, or an ordinary in-house search?
You need a search that starts from the instrument, not the sector. In our experience the phrase describes a sector rather than a capability, and the sector label is what produces two shortlists under one requisition: construction and procurement lawyers on one side, tariff and siting lawyers on the other. Sartori’s Columbus mandate telemetry covers 15 closed in-house searches over the trailing three years; the ones that ran long were the ones whose brief named a building rather than a file. Decide first which of the recurring instruments the seat will own, and the sourcing question answers itself.
How long does the search take, and what usually goes wrong?
Budget 4 to 7 months, and expect the requisition to be the problem. Across our 15 closed Columbus in-house searches over three years, 93 percent completed, counter-offer incidence runs at 32 percent and the median gap between offer and signature is 16 working days. The recurring failure is a brief written for a project: a company scopes the seat around the campus it is building now, the successful candidate arrives, and within a year the department discovers it also owns an annual minimum-demand exposure, a permit that resets per pad and a state proceeding it is not a party to.
Statutes, tariff filings, utility disclosures and agency records.
Load and contract figures come from the utility's own filings and tariff pages. Rules and dates come from the regulators and the legislature that issued them. Land-use figures come from city records. Compensation figures are advertised bands on individual requisitions seen in 2026.
Sources & further reading
36 references- Sartori & Partners — Columbus Legal Talent Research Programme (250 structured interviews; ~4,500 lawyers mapped; quarterly surveys since 2019; mandate telemetry) sartoriglobal.com ↗
- AEP Ohio — Update to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio on data center load (13 February 2026) aepohio.com ↗
- AEP Ohio — Data Center Tariff: Schedule DCT process, thresholds, ramp, collateral and exit terms aepohio.com ↗
- AEP Ohio — Data Center Tariff load study letter, step two of the stipulation (7 November 2025) aepohio.com ↗
- Public Utilities Commission of Ohio — PUCO orders AEP Ohio to create a data center specific tariff, Case No. 24-508-EL-ATA (9 July 2025) puco.ohio.gov ↗
- Public Utilities Commission of Ohio — Case record 24-0508, docket index dis.puc.state.oh.us ↗
- AEP — AEP Ohio proposal on serving data centers adopted by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (9 July 2025) aep.com ↗
- Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel — Quick facts: data centers in Ohio occ.ohio.gov ↗
- Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel — Governor signs House Bill 15 occ.ohio.gov ↗
- Ohio Legislature — Substitute House Bill 15, 136th General Assembly legislature.ohio.gov ↗
- Ohio Power Siting Board — Board authorizes construction of a Licking County behind-the-meter power plant, Case No. 25-0090-EL-BLN (24 July 2025) opsb.ohio.gov ↗
- Ohio EPA — Storm water discharges from small and large construction activities, general permit OHC000006 epa.ohio.gov ↗
- Ohio EPA — Wastewater discharges from data centers: general permit not finalized (community notice, 21 July 2026) epa.ohio.gov ↗
- Ohio EPA — Water quality certification and isolated wetland permits epa.ohio.gov ↗
- Ohio EPA — Applying for an air pollution control permit (permit to install, permit-by-rule) epa.ohio.gov ↗
- City of New Albany — Planning Commission minutes and appendix, final development plan FDP-96-2025 (15 December 2025) newalbanyohio.org ↗
- City of New Albany — Planning Commission packet, Codified Ordinances Chapter 1153 permitted-use table (18 August 2025) newalbanyohio.org ↗
- City of New Albany — Data centers: zoning, noise, abatements and water datacenters.newalbanyohio.org ↗
- City of New Albany — Data center city finances, tax year 2024 datacenters.newalbanyohio.org ↗
- City of New Albany — Natural gas power: behind-the-meter plants in the business park newalbanyohio.org ↗
- City of New Albany — Amazon investment in New Albany and Licking County (7 August 2025) newalbanyohio.org ↗
- News 5 Cleveland — Ohio's data center boom started in New Albany: park scale, facility counts and tax figures (11 May 2026) news5cleveland.com ↗
- PJM Interconnection — 2026 Load Forecast Report (14 January 2026) pjm.com ↗
- PJM Interconnection — AEP large load forecast adjustment request, Load Analysis Subcommittee (16 September 2025) pjm.com ↗
- FERC — Order instituting proceeding, PJM large load integration, docket EL26-67-000 (18 June 2026) ferc.gov ↗
- JobsOhio — Incentives and eligibility, including the data center sales-tax exemption jobsohio.com ↗
- Ohio EPA — Wastewater and stormwater discharges from data centers, draft general permit OHD000001: public notice 31 October 2025, comments due 16 January 2026 (archived snapshot, 29 December 2025) web.archive.org ↗
- Employer posting — Associate General Counsel, Transactions, Columbus headquarters, $221,489.00 to $287,934.50, closed 29 July 2026 bandana.com ↗
- Employer posting — Senior Corporate Counsel, construction, Arlington, $183,100 to $247,700, job ID 10456690 amazon.jobs ↗
- Employer posting — Corporate Counsel, Environment & Sustainable Design, Seattle, $153,900 to $208,200, job ID 10473967 amazon.jobs ↗
- Employer posting — Associate Corporate Counsel, real estate and entitlements, New York $144,700 to $195,700 and Seattle $131,500 to $178,000, job ID 10439532 amazon.jobs ↗
- Law firm posting — Energy and Utilities Attorney, Columbus, Ohio Power Siting Board and PUCO work, $145,000 to $165,000 linkedin.com ↗
- Employer posting — Large Projects Counsel, engineer-procure-construct work in electric power, Columbus linkedin.com ↗
- Employer posting — Commercial Counsel, data center equipment manufacturer, Westerville, Ohio linkedin.com ↗
- Employer posting — Corporate Counsel, Construction, colocation platform, Overland Park, Kansas linkedin.com ↗
- Sartori & Partners — In-house counsel recruiting ↗
Megawatt figures describe four different legal statuses: pre-tariff interest, load studies paid for, capacity under binding contract and historical system peak are four stages of one pipeline. Behind-the-meter generation nameplate is a separate object again, sitting outside the utility's contracted book. Parent-company capital plans and contracted load span an eleven-state footprint rather than Ohio. Threshold and percentage figures are published contractual terms, not measurements of how much power a campus draws. Compensation figures are advertised ranges on single requisitions, not salaries paid and not survey data. The draft-stage dates for the withdrawn data center discharge permit come from an archived snapshot, the agency having replaced that page with its July 2026 decision.
Our own figures — the interview cohort, the mandate telemetry, the counter-offer incidence and the offer-to-acceptance window — come from the continuous research program described on our research page, which sets out the cohorts, the survey waves and the mapping coverage behind every Sartori number quoted above. Coverage in this market is narrower than in the coastal centers: we map roughly 4,500 lawyers across Columbus, and corporate legal departments are a minority of that population.
Adjacent maps for the same buyer.
This seat sits between a federal proceeding that will reshape how large loads take transmission service and the structural work of building a corporate legal department. These pieces extend the map without repeating this article's argument.
FERC Large Load Counsel in Washington DC
The federal proceeding that names Ohio Power Company among its respondents, and what owning that record internally requires.
Read the federal readHiring Your First General Counsel
Scope, reporting line and budget authority: the structural questions that decide whether a first senior legal hire holds a recurring file or drowns in it.
Read the hiring guideIn-House Counsel Recruiting
How we build corporate legal departments: scoping the seat before the search, mapping quietly, and telling a company when a requisition is not ready.
See how we workA quiet conversation
Deciding whether this is a hire or an instruction?
We build corporate legal departments in Columbus, and we are as willing to tell a company that a requisition is not ready as to open a search. Confidential, no obligation.