LAS VEGAS – This month’s Construction Super Conference (CSC) attracted more than 600 attendees, making it the most well-attended CSC in the event’s 39-year history. Knowledge, networking, and inspiration flowed freely during last week’s conference. Check out a sampling of the wisdom heard at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas.
“I’d like to think that each one of us would view mental health as an important issue from the standpoint of pure morality and humanity. If not, think about it from a business standpoint and a liability standpoint. When four times as many people are dying by suicide as are killed in construction accidents; when we see mental health issues increasing as dramatically as they are within the legal community—lawyers know that there is a case you can make out of that. At what point does that transfer into reasonable foreseeability? At what point does that become an issue of liability? On top of that, if you’re stepping in and dealing with this, you’re going to end up with better productivity and better longevity of your employees. Even if you’re not going to look at it from the standpoint of morality and humanity, let your pocketbook do the talking, because we are at that tipping point. It is inevitable that we are going to see cases brought where there was a failure to take reasonable action.” — Steven M. Charney, chair, Peckar & Abramson, River Edge, N.J.
“It [the prospect of tariffs] is the hot topic. Tariffs look like they are coming, although we do have an unpredictable administration, so we don’t know for sure…I got a call from one of my steel contractors from Canada who said, ‘Hey Ron. Talk to me about tariffs.’ The issue is how to take care of them [tariffs]. It’s a straight forward issue. You have to protect yourself, and you have to protect yourself both in your bid and in your contract. The way you are going to do this is to make sure that your contract covers tariffs.”
— Ron Ciotti, partner, Hinkley Allen
“I’m constantly getting contacted by companies saying, ‘Hey check out our AI platform. We could write your contracts for you.’ I just don’t trust it yet. I’ll ask Chat a question about something and it gives me garbage…We’ve heard the stories of AI hallucinating and making up cases and lawyers in New York getting suspended and disbarred.”
— Steve Cvitanovic, general counsel, Build Group
“With regard to a closing argument, you’ve got to make an initial judgement about where you are in the trial. You have to decide whether you are winning or losing. You must decide whether you are reinforcing the jury’s opinion of the case at that point, or—heaven help you—if you’ve got some barriers to overcome. Secondly, you have to decide whether you’re relying on the facts or the law, or if you’ve got both in your favor…If you’ve got a case where the facts are bad and you are relying on the law, then you want to disempower the jury. Tell them that there’s a blank to fill in on the jury form, that this will be the question, that they will be instructed by the judge as follows; and their duty is to follow that instruction. However, if you’ve got maybe a hostile judge, and the judge has ruled against you—and if you’ve got great facts and it went very well—you take an entirely different approach.” — Bruce W. Ficken, chair, Construction Law, Cozen O’Connor, Philadelphia
“I was inspired by the CSC morning Keynote on Tuesday. It made me think about my own leadership style. It was a check on what works and how to lead—namely inspiring creativity and energy. The speaker [Gautam Mukunda] was engaging and I appreciated his choice in companies that he discussed. It was important to reflect on the problems within those companies and why they got there.” — Susan G. Fillichio, trial consultant, Fillichio/Hastings, El Segundo, Calif.
“In a jury trial, when the jury first comes in and they first start hearing about the case, they are not that concerned about the facts. They are not too concerned about who is going to win or lose. They are really looking to you to be the guide through the trial. If you are someone who is genuine, empathetic, and trustworthy, they are going to look to you to guide them, give them the facts, and give them what they need to know to make a decision…That all starts well before you walk into the courtroom. I had a case where we had a long trial and a large pool of jurors, about 150 people. Opposing counsel was late. He came tearing into the court house parking lot, parked in the handicapped spot, immediately got out of his car, and ran toward the court house. That was the exact time that the jury pool was walking in. It was a terrible look.”
— Marion T. Hack, Cozen O’Connor, Los Angeles
“I loved the stories shared by the morning Keynote Speaker [Gautam Mukunda]. They were illustrative of what we should not be doing when it comes to leadership.”
— Richard Kalson, shareholder, Cozen O’Connor, New York, N.Y.
“I’ve been working on projects from the pandemic and on now, where there is still so much of a hangover from a construction ecosystem that is just broadly 30 percent more expensive than it was six years ago. You’re seeing it in business assumptions that are not panning out, but that are on long timelines. It’s a bit of a slow burn until you realize you’re on the wrong side of a capital overrun. We’re seeing projects that find themselves extended, and all of a sudden owners are paying for things they typically never would have had to because what went from being an assumed three percent escalation is now a nine percent—and then 10 percent escalation over a two-year window. That’s going to be with us for a little while until that new normal fully gets settled. Owners and contractors are at odds in terms of the dollar amount they have in their heads for how much something costs.” — Alex McBride, managing director, Construction, Projects & Assets, FTI Consulting, Chicago
“I’m going to move from one Shakespeare quote to another and tell sad stories about the death of kings. The kings here are metaphoric. They are the kings of American business. We’re going to start with Boeing. What went wrong at Boeing? Then we’ll talk about GE…Theory Y is the idea that almost everyone wants to contribute; that people want to work, that work is as natural to people as play, that people want to do something with their time, and they do not want to do the minimum. Theory Y is a fundamentally different assumption about the world. It is the idea that it is your job as a leader not to force people to contribute, but to put them in a position where their natural desire to contribute aligns with the interests of the organization; that what we want you to do is what you want to do.”
— Gautam Mukunda, managing director, The Two Rivers Group, Boston
“This is my second time at CSC. I came here to learn about the mindset of owners and engineers and learn about why they want certain contract provisions. Day one sessions have been really beneficial.” — Roxanne Ramos, Mastec Inc., Miami
“The nerdy engineering definition of AI is what my CTO Rob Otani described. He says it’s the suit that Iron Man wears that can take what you do, and what you’re an expert at, and enhance it; and also give you access to expertise that you might not have. It doesn’t replace you, it augments you.” — Thomas Z. Scarangello, senior advisor, Thornton Tomasetti, New York
“Collaboration is at the heart of what we’re doing in our design-build. We’ve broken down the silos. We no longer have a design project manager who never talks to the procurement project manager who never talks to the construction project manager. They are all going to be on the same table and the same page and it has changed how we’ve done things. It’s absolutely astounding to see public projects brought in—not even on time, but I’m talking years sooner than if we would have done it the old way of design-bid-build. Collaboration is communication, transparency—and it’s a partnership.” — David J. Varoli, deputy commissioner and general counsel, New York City Department of Design and Construction, Long Island City, N.Y.
“You have to divide AI into two different levels. As attorneys we saw it as technology assisted review early on. It was putting information into the computer, having the computer’s algorithms look at it, find patterns, identify things, and spit things out. In the last four years or so, we have generative AI and I break that out from the original AI. Generative AI has the ability to do everything the original AI did, but now it can create things for you.” — Rich Volack, partner and chair, Cyber Security & Data Privacy, Peckar & Abramson
The next Construction Super Conference is scheduled for Dec. 9-11, 2025 at the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point, Bonita Springs, Florida.
