The POWER 30: David E. Suchar

Maslon LLP

David Suchar had little background in construction law or insurance litigation when he started at Maslon LLP. 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 Maslon’s board of directors and executive committee 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 in San Francisco (winning summary adjudication on an 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.

More recently, Suchar is working on a COVID-related business interruption case and on claims arising out of the construction of the Las Vegas Raiders Stadium and the LaGuardia Airport Central Terminal Reconstruction project.

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).

Suchar and Maslon were recognized in Chambers USA 2023, with Chambers noting that “David has an incredible ability to focus on the key issues.”