Missouri Lawyers Media Missouri legal news and public notices
Baker Sterchi Cowden & Rice, St. Louis
Paul Venker isn’t afraid to face constitutional issues of first impression.
Missouri Lawyers Media previously honored Venker with an Influential Advocates Appellate Award in 2017. A year before, he had scored a win in Dodson v. Ferrara alongside fellow POWER LIST honoree Lisa Larkin before the Missouri Supreme Court.
The court ruled that it was constitutional to cap noneconomic damages for the medical malpractice and wrongful death case and others like it. For his clients, it reduced a $10.8 million verdict against them to $2.18 million. That decision has led to reduced verdicts ever since.
Venker earned his law degree in 1980 at the University of Missouri. He went on to join the Missouri Supreme Court research staff and clerked for then-Chief Justice Robert T. Donnelly.
He later spent time in Shepherd Sandberg & Phoenix as well as Armstrong Teasdale before working in-house at Monsanto Company. He co-founded Williams Venker & Sanders in 2001. In 2018, the firm merged with Baker Sterchi Cowden & Rice.
Venker serves on the St. Louis Bar Foundation’s board of directors and is a past president of the organization. He also chairs the Freedom Suits Memorial steering committee, which has established a memorial in St. Louis commemorating slaves’ lawsuits to gain freedom before the Civil War.
