F&P Spotlight on Dave Skomba, An F&P Founding Principal

What is your practice area and how did you choose it?
I practice in several discrete areas including insurance coverage, commercial law and tort defense, as well as product liability, construction defect matters and workers’ compensation.  The tie that binds all these areas is my focus on litigation: I am a trial attorney and an appellate advocate.  While I value the counselor role, especially in insurance coverage, contract and related business matters, I enjoy immensely the challenge of effectively communicating our clients’ interests to both juries and jurists whatever the subject area might be.

What’s your favorite thing about working with your clients?
I love the sense of team, of working together toward a common goal and regardless of result knowing that we did all we could to realize the clients’ goals in the particular mater.

What is your favorite aspect about working at F&P?
The people.  We have a talented and diverse group of attorneys, paralegals and staff that each have their own story and so much to offer.  It has been a pleasure to watch so many of them come to F&P and learn, grow and thrive and then in turn themselves become mentors to new additions to the firm.

What’s your favorite restaurant?
My wife, Jackie, and I have celebrated “date night” every Tuesday at Shannon’s Saloon in Ellicott City for almost 30 years, since our children were very young.  It is important to take time to be with the most important person in one’s life and Shannon’s has been the place where Jackie and I have taken that time.

What’s your proudest accomplishment?
Being part of raising two wonderful children who are accomplished, intelligent, and responsible adults and who are themselves kind and considerate of others.

Tell us something about you that few of your colleagues and clients would know.
That I am a native of New Jersey where my family farmed.

What do you like to do outside the office?
I love to coach and be involved with basketball.  I have coached all levels of boys and girls basketball over the last few decades!  For the last 15 years I have had the honor of coaching girls high school basketball at Mount de Sales Academy where we have been successful both on the court and in the classroom.

Have you read any good books this year that you would recommend?
“Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves” by James Le Fanu, MD

What is your favorite food?
I am a beef-eater!  A good steak, medium rare, is a divine gift.

What is your all-time favorite city or town and why?
Georgetown in the District is my home away from home (but I also like the rest of DC)!

What was the best news you ever received?
Outside of my wife saying “yes,” the news that I had been accepted Early Action at Georgetown University into the School of Foreign Service at Christmas time in 1978.

What is the weirdest thing you have ever eat?
I don’t eat weird things!

If you could have lunch with anyone in the world who would it be?
Asked this years ago I responded immediately and without hesitation, John Clease of Monty Python fame.  I still feel that way, especially if he were to be paying the bill.

Do you have any bizarre talents?
I am a lawyer.  Of course, I have bizarre talents.  I am just not going to share them.