Scope & Range of Services

Fritz R. Kahn is a lawyer with offices at 1920 N Street, NW (8th fl.), Washington, DC 20036, specializing in transportation regulatory matters. He represents shippers, governmental bodies, short line railroads and motor carriers before the Surface Transportation Board, the Federal Railroad Administration, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and reviewing courts.

His work covers the entire gamut of STB’s jurisdiction, including mergers and acquisitions, line extensions and abandonments, rates and services, declaratory order and rule making proceedings and the like, and before the FRA and FMCSA he principally defends those accused of having violated the agency’s regulations.

Among his current clients are Natchez Railway, Potlatch Corporation, State of Illinois Department of Transportation, SMS Rail Services, Inc., V&S Railway. and BK Trucking Company.

Mr. Kahn has been identified and rendered reports as an expert witness in a variety of rail and motor carrier related cases. He is a Researcher for the Legal Knowledge Network and a Council Member of the Gerson Lehman Group.

Mr. Kahn is the founder and manager of Transportation Arbitration and Mediation, P.L.L.C., the body designated to arbitrate disputes of the Transportation Intermediaries Association and the Commodity Classification Standards Board of the National Motor Freight Association.
Now a solo practitioner, he was a partner for many years with Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard and McPherson, at the time Washington's foremost transportation law firm, subsequently merged into DLA Piper Rudnick & Gray Cary US LLP. Among other clients, he then represented were the Chicago and Northwestern Transportation Company, before its acquisition by Union Pacific Railroad Company, and Mobil Chemical Company, before its acquisition by Exxon Chemical Americas.

Mr. Kahn entered private practice after serving six years as the General Counsel of the Interstate Commerce Commission, predecessor of the Surface Transportation Board. In that capacity, among other things he argued two cases before the Supreme Court, Northern Lines Merger Cases, 396 U.S. 491 (1970), and Port of Portland v. United States, 408 U.S. 811 (1972).

Mr. Kahn is a member and a past President of the Association of Transportation Professionals, a member and a past General Counsel of the Transportation Research Forum, and a member of the American Society of Transportation Logistics and of the Transportation Lawyers Association.

He is a frequent contributor to transportation law journals, his most recent article being "Those Staid Stays", vol. 76, The Journal of Transportation Law, Logistics and Policy, no. 2, Second Quarter 2009.

Mr. Kahn is a Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa graduate of the Columbian College of the George Washington University of Washington, DC, and an Order of the Coif and Law Review graduate of the University’s National Law Center.