While Roberta Cooper Ramo, who in 1995 will become the first woman president of the American Bar Association, figures to become a role model for thousands of women, her own role model has been “The Little Engine That Could.”
Petite, poised and energetic, Ramo seems to brush off obstacles that might stop lesser mortals in their tracks. In 1991, the Albuquerque lawyer failed to win her first bid to head the 375,000-member, Chicago-based organization.
Returning home, Ramo was astonished to discover her law office flooded with messages from women across the country, including many outside the legal profession, expressing disappointment.
“I did not appreciate how much support there was for me,” said Ramo, 51, who was slated in February to run unopposed and was named president-elect at the ABA’s annual meeting in New Orleans in early August. Even though her presidency is a year away, Ramo is already garnering national attention because, as she puts it, “there’s a new sheriff in town.”
She has her agenda mapped out, and high on the list is elevating the sagging public image of lawyers who, Ramo believes, aren’t fully appreciated for the role they play in maintaining the democratic process. She also wants to hone in on the issue of violence.
“The problems of violence concern both me and the ABA greatly,” she said. “You can’t have a legal system in which everyone is in terror of being gunned down each day.”
Targeting domestic abuse is critical because, “besides being the No. 1 health problem among women, it’s also the place where the seeds of violence are sown in children,” she said.
One of Ramo’s pet projects will be orchestrating a joint effort with the American Medical Association to address these issues.
Ramo doesn’t minimize the significance of her election, which is a rarity among professional organizations. The AMA, for instance, has never had a female president.
“It would be ridiculous to contend that after 117 years (of male presidents at the ABA), it’s not a big deal,” she concedes.
That’s because Ramo will be presiding over the nation’s largest legal organization, whose key functions include lobbying for lawyers in Congress, evaluating the qualifications of U.S. Supreme Court nominees and other federal judicial candidates, accrediting law schools and speaking out on matters of public concern.
In 1992, for example, the association passed a resolution stating its support for reproductive choice at a time when the Supreme Court was poised to overrule Roe vs. Wade.
“Personally, it’s important to me to make people understand that I’m the president of all the lawyers,” she said.
But Ramo is also quick to declare herself a feminist.
“You couldn’t have lived my life and not be,” she said.
Her earliest ambition was to be a university president, which led her to law school because it seemed a natural stepping stone. Once there, however, she fell in love with the law and its possibilities for social change.
She grew up in Albuquerque in a family where “no one ever said to me that you can’t do this because you’re a girl,” she recalled. Consequently, “I didn’t have to cast off the shackles that a lot of women have had put upon them by society.”
From her father, the owner of a chain of western-wear stores, Ramo inherited an interest in business management that eventually led her to become managing partner of her law firm and a national speaker on law practice.
But even though Ramo said she has never been a victim of the glass ceiling or sexual harassment, she acknowledges that “it wouldn’t be possible to live through my times and not be sensitive to the difficulties that all of us had fought through.”
Those difficulties included being unable to find a job when she graduated from law school in 1967 from the University of Chicago after receiving her bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado. Ramo was bound for Durham, N.C., where her husband of three years, Barry, was to begin a residency as a cardiologist at Duke University.
“I sent out letters, but nobody responded,” she said. The one firm that did interview her had misread her application and thought she was Robert Ramo.
Finally, the dean of the law school intervened and contacted Terry Sanford, who had just completed a term as governor of North Carolina. Sanford helped Ramo find a job working for the Ford Foundation. When the program ended a year later, Ramo was hired by Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., a small, black college, to help students prepare for law school and to teach courses in African-American studies and Constitutional law.
Ironically, being pregnant with her first child, Josh-now 25 and a publishing executive with Newsweek’s online division-may have won and lost her jobs. She was forced to turn down a teaching fellowship because it required her to go out of town the week of her due date. Then she moved to San Antonio so her husband could serve in the military.
A local law firm hired her on the spot when she was nine months pregnant.
Ramo was assigned to the civil litigation department and taken under the wing of one of the firm’s elders, a Republican ex-Marine “who was determined he was going to make a lawyer out of me if we both died trying,” she said. Ramo recalls the firm as being enormously supportive, even allowing her to juggle her schedule so she could write a book on office management for the ABA.
The next stop was Albuquerque, where Ramo and her husband put down roots. By now a mother of two-Ramo’s daughter, Jennifer, 23, is coordinator of an inner-city volunteer program in Los Angeles-she practiced on her own for three years and later joined a firm where she innovated a flex-time arrangement.
She specialized in commercial real estate and health care law and became managing partner for 12 years at Poole, Kelly & Ramo. The firm filed for bankruptcy in 1993. The insolvency did not seem to affect either Ramo’s candidacy or her career, and she moved last year to the firm of Modrall, Sperling, Roehl, Harris & Sisk.
She also broke with the tradition that ABA presidential candidates had to be both former state bar association presidents and chairs of the ABA’s House of Delegates, which votes on association policy. Ramo was neither, although she was president of the Albuquerque Bar Association. Some saw her as leapfrogging, but Ramo claims that it’s actually a myth that candidates must have these prerequisites.
“The backgrounds of the men are as varied as mine,” she said. “What’s important is to have enough participation so that you have an idea of the breadth of the association’s interests and get to be known by the nominating committee.”
Accumulating the necessary credentials can take years, which is why Ramo believes there have been a dearth of women candidates until recently.
“Fifteen years ago I hadn’t done any of the things that would have led me to believe I could be ABA president,” said Ramo, who has held various ABA positions and has headed the local symphony board.
She credits the association’s Commission on Women in the Profession, first chaired by Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1986, with prodding the ABA to improve its record on promoting women into the leadership ranks. The commission kept the issue on the front burner by issuing annual report cards to groups within the ABA, grading them on their efforts to advance women.
The current chair, Chicago lawyer Laurel Bellows, believes that Ramo’s election spells a sea change.
“The influx of women into the profession has changed the `face of the profession’ so that now the ABA nominating committee can picture Roberta at the ABA’s helm and not a 6-foot-tall man with silver hair and tortoise-shell glasses,” Bellows said.
Ramo has a distinctively different leadership style, said Bellows, who made Chicago Magazine’s recent list of the city’s 10 most powerful lawyers. “Roberta’s style is one of competence but not aggressiveness,” she said.
According to her husband, Ramo is also a consensus builder.
“Her great strength is bringing together people of disparate views and helping them find a common ground so that they can accomplish a project that makes everyone proud,” he said. He praises her as “extremely well read,” “a quick study” and “a tireless worker,” and agrees with her assessment that she is a “fabulous” cook-possibly the first ABA president to make that claim publicly.
Ramo said she doubts that lawyer bashers will go easy on her because she’s a woman.
“I’m happy to stand up to Dan Quayle,” who blasted lawyers in the ’92 campaign, or “anyone else who doesn’t understand that lawyers are the keystone of democracy,” she said.
