Capacity to Contract
NUCA’s 2009 Associate of the Year Crusades for Contractual Equality
By Jason Morgan
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Charles and his wife Valerie (Center) on Capitol Hill visiting Georgia Representative Sanford Bishop during
the 2010 NUCA Washington Summit. |
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Charles Surasky doesn’t have a glamorous construction job. His trenches are between the lines of contract documents and his pen is mightier than any contractor’s shovel. You see, Charles is an attorney with Smith Currie & Hancock LLP construction law firm. Every day, Charles crusades against project owners and unfair contracts that paint the contractor into a legal corner. He’s an unsung hero of the construction industry and his tireless efforts, as well as his outstanding work with the National Utility Contractors Association (NUCA), has earned him the prestigious title of NUCA’s 2009 Associate of the Year.
“Smith Currie has always given me the opportunity to work on interesting and challenging cases, both large and small,” says Surasky. “I have been lucky to have formed many lasting friendships and professional relationships over the years. My involvement with NUCA and the Georgia Utility Contractors Association [GUCA] over the last nine years has been one of the most rewarding parts of my career.”
While being an attorney was Charles’ dream, the construction industry was in his blood. Before Charles went to law school, he worked for Daniel International Construction Co. (now known as Fluor-Daniel) as a millwright and millwright foreman. Even though he knew that he was going to take some time off from school after graduating with his bachelor’s degree from the University of South Carolina in 1973, he took the law school admissions test before heading into the private sector.
“I grew up in the ‘60s and went to college at the beginning of the ‘70s. Planning out your life wasn’t really in vogue those days,” Charles says with a laugh. “Before I went to law school, I never even knew a practicing lawyer. My father was a math professor at the University of South Carolina, so I had no clue what being a lawyer was really about. In a lot of ways, I was lucky that I ended up at George Washington University Law School.”
Charles went to George Washington University Law School (GW) because he wanted to study international law (“Whatever that is,” he quipped in the interview). During his first semester, Charles had to take contract law and he did well in the class. His contracts professor asked him to work as a research assistant in the government contracts program at GW.
Charles worked for the government contracts program for the remainder of the time he was at GW. After graduation, Charles had some trouble finding a firm that suited him.
“I interviewed with all the D.C. firms that did contracts and wasn’t that thrilled with any of them,” he recalls. “John Cibinic, the Co-director of GW’s Government Contracts Program was a friend of Overton Currie. He said, ‘You’ve done construction work before law school. You should go talk to Smith Currie & Hancock.’ So, I did. And they hired me.”
Smith Currie has always had a substantial government contracts program, which helped Charles fit into the firm nicely. The firm was founded in 1965 by G. Maynard Smith, Overton A. Currie and E. Reginald Hancock as a law firm specializing in labor and construction law. The firm has since added offices in Washington, D.C., Charlotte, N.C., Tallahassee, Fla., Ft.
Lauderdale, Fla., and Las Vegas. Today, Smith Currie has more than 60 lawyers, all specializing in various aspects of private and government construction law.
The firm’s lawyers work as advocates, mediators and arbitrators to offer advice and counseling in all aspects of construction law and government contracting — from contract negotiations to bid protests, claims and dispute resolution.
“The bulk of my practice involves payment disputes — large and small,” explains Charles. “Right now, we’re involved in a lawsuit in which we represent a large brewing company. The damages we’re seeking are in the tens of millions of dollars. On the other hand, I have a case for an architect who lives in my neighborhood who is seeking $30,000 that the client refused to pay. That case is almost pro-bono quite frankly, but we do claims from $5 million to those in the tens of millions of dollars. That’s our bread and butter.”
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| Charles takes a moment to socialize with other NUCA members during the Washington Summit. |
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Though the construction industry is still hurting for jobs, the attorneys at Smith Currie & Hancock’s Washington, D.C., office have their hands full with contractors who want to get into federally-funded construction contracts.
Aside from his successful practice at Smith Currie & Hancock, Charles has been a leader in both GUCA and NUCA. Before getting involved with the associations, Charles had fallen into, what he calls, a “big case rut.” Huge case after huge case had him running all over the country. When his focus shifted to moving his practice back to the southeast, a partner who had worked extensively with GUCA asked Charles if he wanted to get involved.
“I’ve always liked yellow paint and big machines and had done enough work for plant and line contractors over the years that I hit it off with the members and staff of GUCA,” he says.
Charles made a splash at GUCA, eventually becoming one of GUCA’s Board of Directors and the local chapter’s Associate of the Year 2003 — 2004. It’s no surprise that Charles and Smith Currie’s involvement in NUCA grew out of Smith Currie’s work for GUCA. In 2004, Charles traveled to Orlando, Fla., to attend his very first NUCA event — EXPO. Charles got involved with NUCA’s attorney’s forum, but he quickly realized that to do some good within the association, he needed to get involved with the committees and contractor members. That evolved into his leadership position within NUCA’s Contract Documents and Specifications Committee.
The brunt of Charles work with the Contract Docs and Specs Committee has been focused on standardized contract documents. What’s a standardized contract? It’s a document that can be used as a precedent for sharing project responsibilities. In any construction project, you have three main players — the owner of the project, the architect or engineer who designed the project and then you have the contractor (and contractors of contractors) who build the project. Each of these entities has competing interests.
The vast majority of today’s construction projects, including utility projects throughout the country are done with what some people call manuscript contracts, which are simple contracts that an engineer types for the owner or contracts that many contractors give to their sub-contractors, for example. But standardized documents are starting to become more accepted.
There are several standardized contractor documents that are widely used today. The American Institute of Architects documents protects the architects first, the owner second and the contractor last. The engineers’ Engineers Joint Contract Documents Committee (EJCDC) standard contract document has an allocation of risk that’s sensitive to the engineer, then the owner and then the contractor. And recently, the Associated General Contractors of American (AGC) released its series of Consensus Documents, which favor contractors, not surprisingly. The challenge that NUCA’s Contract Docs and Specs Committee faces, Charles explains, is working to improve standard form contracts to make the allocation of risk fair among the various players.
“What we’re trying to do with EJCDC is make it fairer in areas where it is used, like Indiana,” says Charles. “Another goal is to create a standard form document that a contractor in say, Iowa, and I’m not sure if they use the EJCDC contract in Iowa, can take to an engineer and say, ‘Hey, your contract says that we have to do this and it doesn’t seem fair. Wouldn’t it be fairer to do this national standard form document?’”
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| Charles and his wife Valerie enjoying the Luau during NUCA’s EXPO — the Executive Experience in 2008. |
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While changing established standard form documents is an uphill battle, Charles believes that working with the EJCDC standardized contract document is a worth-while effort. Without collaboration, a contract that is balanced for all parties wouldn’t be possible. With a more balanced document, NUCA can become more of an active proponent of its use and promote it through the industry.
“In NUCA, we don’t see big utility projects using the Consensus Docs anytime soon because EJCDC is just going through its cyclical revision of the construction documents,” Charles explains. “There’s a several-page list of changes to the engineer document that we thought would make it fairer for the contractor. We’re going to start talking about that at the Committee meetings and we’ll continue to talk about that for the next year. I suspect that we’ll get some of what we ask for, but it’s a long process.”
In addition to working with NUCA, Smith Currie & Hancock is involved with several other associations, most notably AGC and the American Building Contractors. The firm is also involved with electrician and highway contractor associations. Charles also attends EJCDC meetings as a NUCA liaison. All of these relationships help keep the work and the parties involved in perspective for Charles, who works toward more balanced documents.
For Charles, like so many NUCA members before, the key to success is involvement. “As a lawyer, I see a wide variety of the problems that contractors can experience,” he says. “I try to share what I have learned about how those problems can be avoided.”
Within NUCA, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who knows his or her way through a contract document better than Charles. It’s his knowledge, understanding and helping hand that has earned him the title of 2009 NUCA Associate Member of the Year.
Jason Morgan is Associate Editor of Utility Contractor.
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