Suzanna Moran began her legal career as a staff attorney at The Environmental Law Institute, a preeminent Washington DC think tank. After four years, she moved to Denver and began practicing law with Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll—a national Tier 1 firm—where she focused on environmental and natural resources litigation. A few years later, she joined a boutique Seventeenth Street environmental litigation firm where she represented both plaintiffs and defendants in a variety of environmental and natural resource litigation matters (some of which were prominently featured in national and international news), with a specific emphasis on the mining, oil and gas, and nuclear materials industries. She successfully litigated a number of citizen suits under federal environmental statutes, toxic-tort actions in state courts, and numerous environmental cost-recovery actions valued in the millions to hundreds of millions of dollars.

On the transactional and regulatory side, Suzanna also represented her corporate clients in complex real estate deals with environmental liability implications and routinely counseled them on compliance, permitting, and the development and implementation of self-auditing programs.

Suzanna is now a Full Professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. She primarily teaches students how to research, analyze, communicate, and advocate in the litigation context. She has taught environmental law at Denver Law multiple times and now teaches entertainment law with a specific focus on the music industry.

Today, Suzanna’s practice is focused on arts and entertainment, finally merging her two passions: law and the arts. She represents creatives in making deals with their management teams, labels, publishers, and other artists, and protecting their intellectual rights in a wide variety of contexts. Suzanna is a lifelong classical musician as well as a novelist. Before joining the faculty at Denver Law, she was the Director of the Publications Department of the Denver Art Museum for two years where her wide-ranging responsibilities included a variety of legal matters, including artist copyrights, permissions, and royalties, as well as the Museum’s own intellectual property. She also served on the Board of Directors of the Jefferson Symphony Orchestra for many years. 

Suzanna has a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from the University of Michigan, a Master of Science in Natural Resource Policy and Planning from the University of Michigan, and a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts from the University of Texas. She is licensed to practice law in Colorado, New York, and Texas, and her licensure in California is underway.

Education

• University of Michigan Law School
• Doctor of Jurisprudence/Juris Doctor (J.D.), 1992