ABA's new president hopes to alter perception of lawyers

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 4, 1995 | by Frank J. Murray

Roberta Cooper Ramo became the first female president of the American Bar Association in early August, but she doesn't expect to be the last. Since the new head of its policy-making House of Delegates also is a woman, Ramo expects the 370,000-member ABA's image to soften from that of a male-dominated organization of "stodgy conservative white guys."

While some critics discount that conservative rap and say the ABA has hyperactive liberal glands, Ramo laughs at that, too. "I don't think either of those things is true," she says. As she travels, she urges lawyers to buff the profession's image and become role models who are "responsible and strive for ethical elegance."

Yet during a speaking tour berating efforts to enact constitutional amendments on a balanced budget, school prayer and flag burning, she remarked: "The current Congress has lost sight of the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights as our nation's lodestar and our soul."

During Ramo's one-year presidency, which began at the ABA's annual meeting in Chicago, she hopes to:

* Save the Legal Services Corp. from congressional execution and make the debate less abrasive than that waged by her colorful predecessor, George Bushnell, who called members of Congress "reptilian bastards." (The House has voted to defund the corporation, but the appropriations process is incomplete.)

* Enhance the role of women as the nation observes the 75th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave the right to vote to women.

* Explain to a hostile nation the role of lawyers in a republic.

"I hope to have the chance to alter the perception for all women of what 'able' is," says this mother of two who claims she was able to fight to the top without flexing affirmative-action muscles. But Ramo, 52, was not elected easily: She won on her second try.

Despite graduating with honors from the University of Chicago Law School, Ramo could not get a job in 1967 and was refused repeatedly by Raleigh, N.C., firms. "When you go through those experiences, it makes you much more sensitive about what it feels like to have somebody look at you first not because of your skills but because of some other part of the package you come in," Ramo says. She stresses the role of personal responsibility in dealing with set-backs. "You can either get up one more time and try to find the next good thing, or you can lie there and spend a lot of time worrying about the event or people that knocked you down," she says.

Three years later Ramo got her first chance at the San Antonio, Texas, firm of Sawtelle, Goode, Davidson and Traylo. "I was the first woman this firm had ever hired. I was nine months pregnant. I always tease them that they hired me to get me out of the office before I actually gave birth in the reception room," she says.

Ramo was taken in tow by John W. Goode Jr., now an ardent supporter but then the partner most opposed to hiring a woman. "His basic view was that he was going to turn me into a lawyer or we were both going to die trying," she said, adding her regrets that he didn't live to see her take office. "He had been told in the hospital that I had won the nomination just before he died. That was a very meaningful thing to me," she says.

Ramo moved to Albuquerque in 1972 and became a leading figure in commercial real-estate law there. She moved three years ago from a firm in which she was a partner to become a shareholder in the larger Modrall Law Firm.

"She's able to get people to buy her dream" says her husband, Barry, a cardiologist and television-news personality. "She articulates what they think but really couldn't say that well. She helps lawyers understand why they're important, and when she speaks to them they all feel better about what they do and [she] makes people stand up a little bit taller."