The first thing to understand about Cozen O'Connor Public Strategies is that Washington is not its whole map. It is merely the most famous dot. The firm begins at the White House and Capitol Hill, then keeps going: Albany and New York City, Harrisburg and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Richmond, Chicago, Minneapolis, Trenton. This sounds like geography. It is actually the business model.
A company can win an argument in Congress and still lose in the rulemaking. It can survive a statehouse only to meet a mayor, an attorney general, a procurement officer, an impatient neighborhood coalition, or a brutal news cycle. Public policy has become a relay race in which the baton is passed between institutions that do not use the same language. CPS sells itself as the team that keeps running.
A collapse opened the door
CPS arrived in September 2009, but its prehistory begins with something failing. WolfBlock, a Philadelphia law firm more than a century old, voted to dissolve. Cozen O'Connor absorbed parts of its real estate, private-client, finance, and government-relations practices. Then client demand pushed the parent firm to formalize a separate public-strategies business. The new affiliate promised policy advocacy, regulatory counsel, and contract procurement at federal, state, and local levels.
The founding leadership was deliberately mixed. Mark Alderman, a prominent Democrat and former WolfBlock chairman, led the federal effort. Republican former ambassador David Girard-diCarlo helped oversee growth. State and local work had its own experienced hands. Bipartisanship was not decorative copy pasted onto a one-party shop. It was a piece of the machinery.
A few months later, Howard Schweitzer joined from the federal government. His résumé is almost comically suited to the continuity business: service during the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations, years at the Export-Import Bank, and then the first chief operating officer of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. A person who helped build the operating infrastructure for TARP had learned a useful lesson about government: during a crisis, the org chart matters as much as the headline.
“We breathe real air, not just Beltway oxygen.”How CPS describes its state and local advantage
Schweitzer became CEO and expanded the firm from three regional offices to nine. Today its public materials count more than 50 professionals. The office list is the tell. Washington supplies the national lens; local teams supply memory - which committee chair cares about which amendment, how a governor's office prefers to be approached, why a workable New York message can die on contact with Chicago.
Fewer surprises, sold by the engagement
“Lobbying” is accurate but undersized. CPS advocates for legislation and executive action. It tracks regulation, drafts policy language, builds coalitions, looks for grants and government contracts, stewards applications, prepares testimony, trains executives for the media, and manages reputation during a crisis. Its clients include corporations, startups, nonprofits, trade associations, and prominent individuals across health care, infrastructure, technology, energy, real estate, finance, education, communications, hospitality, entertainment, transportation, and insurance.
- Move a policy Legislative and executive advocacy, from amendments to agency engagement.
- Read the weather Daily monitoring, 50-state tracking, and analysis that explains consequence.
- Find the money Procurement, grant, and loan strategy before and after an application.
- Hold the story Coalition, media, crisis, litigation, and reputation communications.
The procurement practice reveals the company's view of government. A regulator can also be a customer, investor, or financier. The work therefore starts before an RFP appears: identify the funding pipeline, understand which decisions unlock it, position the applicant, then keep advocating when an application hits the inevitable bureaucratic snag. The promise is not a magic door. It is prepared navigation.
What does that cost? CPS publishes no rate card, and project economics are not public. Like most high-touch government-relations firms, it sells tailored professional engagements whose price depends on duration, jurisdictions, staffing, and the mix of advocacy, intelligence, procurement, or communications. Public lobbying disclosures illuminate pieces of the business, not a universal customer price. New York's preliminary 2025 tally, for example, listed the firm tenth by number of clients in the state, with 214 clients and about $6.7 million in reportable compensation there. That is a jurisdictional filing, not company revenue.
If a problem lives in one agency, one city, and one news cycle, a specialist may be cheaper and sharper. CPS's integrated model earns its keep when an issue crosses jurisdictions, political parties, legal questions, and public audiences.
Continuity beats access
Every lobbying firm talks about relationships. Relationships are necessary and easy to advertise. CPS's more defensible difference is continuity. Elections replace officials. Administrations reverse priorities. A federal victory becomes a state implementation fight. The company tries to preserve one strategic thread through those changes, aided by the adjacent resources of an Am Law 100 parent with more than 1,000 attorneys and a substantial state attorneys general practice.
That structure puts CPS between categories. Against a pure federal shop, it can offer local operators. Against a local specialist, it can coordinate a national campaign. Against a communications agency, it brings policy staff and lobbyists. Against a law-firm policy group, it presents a distinct public-affairs organization with communications and research products of its own. The alternatives are formidable - Brownstein, Ballard, BGR, Akin, Mercury, Forbes Tate, Tusk, Purple, and hundreds of specialist firms - so integration has to be more than a diagram. The handoffs must actually disappear for the client.
The firm's recent hiring shows where it believes the market is moving. Tamara Hinton arrived in 2024 to lead strategic communications. In 2025, Matthew Murray joined with newsroom, speechwriting, social, and digital experience. This was an institutional answer to a changed stakeholder field. Government affairs once meant persuading government. Now employees, customers, investors, activists, and reporters can alter the political path before a vote occurs. Message and policy can no longer live in different buildings.
The quiet product is not influence. It is coordination when the same problem has acquired five owners.
What another firm can copy
Three parts travel well. First, organize around the customer's maze rather than your own departments. A client does not care whether a reputation problem belongs to communications or policy; it cares that the problem stops. Second, put expertise where decisions are made. Local fluency is difficult to fake and ages better than parachute consulting. Third, publish the intelligence engine. Cozen Currents, the Beltway & Beyond podcast, and local briefings such as New York Note and Pennsylvania Perspective turn private pattern recognition into a public demonstration of judgment.
But the model needs the right conditions. It works when assignments genuinely cross borders and disciplines, when teams share credit, and when a parent law firm adds expertise without confusing legal and lobbying roles. It works less well for a narrow, inexpensive, one-off matter; for a client seeking public grassroots scale rather than institutional advocacy; or whenever internal coordination becomes slower than hiring the best specialist directly.
The pleasant irony is that CPS grew by resisting Washington's favorite habit: believing Washington is the center of everything. Its bet is subtler. Power is distributed, implementation is local, reputation is public, and somebody has to keep the map folded the same way from meeting to meeting.