Allan Marks is a Lecturer both at the UCLA School of Law, where he teaches Energy & Infrastructure Finance and is Affiliated Faculty at the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy, and at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where he teaches Structuring & Negotiating Complex Financial Transactions.

Marks is also a Senior Fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, a center of Columbia University’s Climate School, a Non-Resident Visiting Senior Fellow at NYU’s SPS Center for Global Affairs, and a Distinguished Scholar in Energy Law & Sustainability and Professorial Lecturer in Law the George Washington University Law School. He previously taught Energy & Infrastructure Project Finance at the University of California, Berkeley for twelve years at both the Law School and the Haas School of Business, and he taught a course on project finance in the post-graduate program in Derecho de Empresa at the Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City.

Marks serves as President and Commissioner of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest municipal utility in the United States. He also serves as an independent director of a private infrastructure fund and on other boards. He advises boards of directors, senior executives, bankers, fund managers and other organizations on risk mitigation and corporate strategy, particularly in connection with international investment, the energy transition, renewable energy, innovative clean technologies, geopolitics, climate risks, resilience and sustainability.

As a lawyer at Milbank LLP for over 30 years, he was a partner in the firm’s Global Project, Energy & Infrastructure Finance group and member of the Private Equity, Renewable Energy, Latin America, and Global Risk & National Security practices. He has handled complex transactions in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Europe with an aggregate value of over $100 billion. Marks is one of the world’s leading project finance lawyers with deep expertise across multiple sectors: power and renewable energy, transportation, water supply and water treatment, airports, rail, port terminals, alternative fuels, social infrastructure, and telecommunications and digital infrastructure. Focused on energy and infrastructure project finance and development, his practice encompassed international and cross-border transactions, private equity, mergers & acquisitions, acquisition finance, capital markets and private placements, public-private partnerships, joint ventures, restructurings, construction, banking, insurance and regulatory matters, and a range of commercial transactions. 

He is the author of numerous articles, including "Think Globally and Act Locally: Collaboration Across Borders to Address Climate Change" in the Denver Journal of International Law and Policy (Spring 2025, vol. 53, no. 2). Marks is a Contributor to Forbes. He created and hosted the Law, Policy & Markets podcast and speaks and publishes frequently on energy, infrastructure, business strategy, financial markets, climate change, public policy, regulatory trends, and international transactions. He has been interviewed and quoted in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, POLITICO Pro, CNN Business, Bloomberg, S&P Global Market Intelligence, and other media outlets.

Marks was for eleven years the founding co-chair of the State Bar of California’s Subsection on Public-Private Infrastructure. He is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy and served on Law360's Project Finance Editorial Board. 

Marks received his B.A. in International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University and his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.