Minnesota Lawyer
Maslon
David Suchar had little background in construction law or insurance litigation when he started at Maslon. He was a federal prosecutor in Atlanta and before that was at Kirkland Ellis in Chicago. He relocated to Minnesota for family reasons.
Now he is the vice chair of Malson’s board of directors and chair of the construction and real estate litigation group. He educated himself about insurance, and began to write and lecture about it.
He had a big break of a year in 2018. He handled claims involving Millennium Tower, Transbay Transit Center, and Salesforce Tower (San Francisco) (winning summary adjudication on insurance case for the duty to defend on $12 million in legal fees), and a pedestrian bridge collapse that killed six at Florida International University.
Closer to home, Suchar was lead counsel for the structural engineer for all construction claims on the U.S. Bank Stadium project.
“Minnesota is a great home state for a national practice,” Suchar said. “There are lot of cases here, but it’s also 1,500 miles to anywhere.”
Suchar frequently presents at conferences across the country on construction and insurance coverage issues, drawing from his experience on the Steering Committee for the ABA Forum on Construction Law’s Division 7 (Insurance, Surety & Liens) and as contributing editor of The Construction Lawyer, the ABA construction publication.
In 2022, Suchar took over as host of the ABA’s “Construction Law Today” podcast series. In addition, he was lead co-author for the insurance chapter in the ABA’s decennial Construction Defects book (2021) and authored several insurance chapters in the ABA’s Construction Checklists book (2022).
And one last thing: Suchar put his prosecutor hat back on to assist Maslon partner Steve Schleicher in the prosecution of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.
