Paul Grahovac

Paul Grahovac remembers helping his dad shingle a roof when he was barely big enough to climb the ladder. As he grew up, so did his experiences in all kinds of hands-on jobs – working with gravel, sand and cement, putting up hay, over-the-road trucking, carpentry and concrete flatwork. These experiences also prompted Grahovac to realize the importance of going to college “to avoid a lot of digging and shoveling in later life.” In law school and in his early years practicing law, he worked on cases in commercial real estate development, including a failed pour of a shopping center deck and a defective foundation, all of which exposed him to the design and construction details of this type of project. According to Grahovac, “This taught me how to predict the long-term result of current actions simply by ‘playing the film forward’ to analyze the probably sequence of things.”

One day, the senior partner of his law firm asked Grahovac to go visit a client to help them prepare for new OSHA and EPA requirements. The client was a manufacturer of construction chemicals called PROSOCO. A few weeks after spending the day with them, he was offered a job to join PROSOCO as its first General Counsel, and he accepted. At PROSOCO, he implemented a series of new disclaimers in product literature to ward off misuse cases. “The lawyers I worked for in my early years told me that your client needs always to be the one wearing the white hat, as in the old Westerns. I’ve always counseled that PROSOCO go out of its way to help, and I like to think that has contributed to our motto, ‘You. Us. The project.’”