But Can She Stop the Lawyer Jokes? : Law: Roberta Cooper Ramo, the first woman to lead the ABA, is tired of the anti-attorney backlash and wants to reform her profession’s image.

For three weeks now, Roberta Cooper Ramo has been in perpetual motion, flying from one meeting to the next, relying on her fax- and modem-equipped PowerBook and her trusty Franklin Planner to keep her in touch and on schedule.

Briefly docked here at the mother ship--the law firm of Modrall, Sperling, Roehl, Harris & Sisk--Ramo pauses for a breather.

But she’s as overbooked as ever and apologizes for having less than an hour before she is scheduled to take a conference call. Adjusting her horn-rims, she perches expectantly behind her antique desk to discuss her recent selection to head the American Bar Assn.

When she takes over as the first woman president of the 388,000-lawyer organization in August, 1995, Ramo will become the most visible representative of a profession reeling from rapid economic change and a tattered public image.

But although she has campaigned for the post since the late 1980s, steadily building a power base nationwide among key ABA constituencies, she dismisses the idea that somehow she had this all thought out.

“People think I’ve had this plan,” Ramo says, a tad plaintively. “I’ve never had any plan at all, other than trying to make it through the day.”

So just how did this 51-year-old real estate lawyer--from a lightly populated state--and best known within the profession for her writings on the arcane subject of law practice management, come to be Top Lawyer of one of the nation’s top lobbying groups?

A clue might lie in Ramo’s rejection by firms after graduating from the University of Chicago law school in 1967. None would hire her because she was a woman.

It never occurred to her to sue for discrimination--in part because there was no legal basis to do so at the time.

“I only got mad a couple of times,” she recalls. “Most of what you feel is there’s something wrong with you, so you don’t get mad. I must have a high pain tolerance or something.”

But a willingness to make the best of whatever opportunity presented itself and the ability to overlook snubs and setbacks have served Ramo well in her ascension.

“Maybe the greatest lesson is I did a lot of things I never would have done if I had had a grand plan,” she says.

Not surprisingly, Ramo sees her presidency as the culmination of an evolutionary process.

“It’s the fruition,” she shrugs. “I am not a one-woman band. As you look around the ABA, there are countless women of major influence. The exciting part is, for one year, when people want to have a lawyer talk to them, it gets to be me.”

*

A slight woman who wears her long, silver hair pulled back with a headband, Ramo is businesslike and self-deprecatingly funny. Her friends describe her as smart and goal-directed.

Her ABA successes owe as much to those qualities as to her resilience.

For 20 years she has been a dedicated networker, chairing bar subgroups (called sections) and panels, as well as traveling to seminars and workshops--meeting future constituents.

Says Barbara Mayden, a New York lawyer on the ABA’s governing board, “It’s difficult not to gush. It’s hard to know her well and not be a partisan. She’s just terrific at anything she does.”

Ramo is “very diplomatic” and has been adept at winning over older male lawyers with her thoughtful, non-confrontational style. “The old guys seem to love her,” Mayden says. “She’s fun.”

Mayden says that when she first met Ramo, she was stunned to learn that she wasn’t a litigator because of her off-the-cuff speaking ability.

But Texas lawyer J. Harris Morgan, a longtime Ramo acquaintance, says that at times she is too focused and abrasive.

“I think sometimes she is personally insensitive,” he says. “I think she’s tended to burn bridges that didn’t need to be burned.”

Ramo expresses surprise at Morgan’s assessment, although she readily admits that she often speaks her mind.

“Some people,” she says, “have a different response to women who are being straightforward.”

*

Ramo shunned the traditional route to the ABA presidency, in which a candidate is expected to have first headed a state bar association. That led to criticism that she hadn’t paid her dues.

But as chair of the Law Practice Management Section of the ABA--a group of lawyers interested in ways to make law firms run more effectively--Ramo was building her power base. During the mid-’80s, she was part of a movement by the ABA’s specialty sections to gain representation on the governing board and nominating committee. It was her first ABA-wide involvement.

Ramo first thought of running for president after listening to a 1985 speech by former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger.

“He came to the ABA and just excoriated lawyers, and it really made me mad,” Ramo recalls. “I just thought to myself, ‘We’ve reached a bad point in our profession when the chief of our profession is that scornful.’

“And then I said, maybe I should run to be president and see what happens. I hadn’t thought about winning .”

So strong was Ramo’s grass-roots support that when she first stood for the ABA presidency in 1991, the 61-member nominating committee took an unprecedented 88 ballots before a three-way deadlock was resolved in favor of another candidate.

Ramo returned to Albuquerque “exhausted and frustrated,” says Jack McCarthy, a Santa Fe, N.M., lawyer and a longtime ABA delegate who ran her presidential campaigns.

“A number of attorneys felt we couldn’t let her come back to New Mexico and leave the national picture.

“We started testing the water and found out there was very strong support,” McCarthy says.

This time, Ramo was unstoppable. By the time the nominating committee met in Kansas City last February, the other candidates had dropped out because she had locked up a voting majority.

*

Ramo’s persistence has served her well over the years. She is the eldest of three daughters whose father ran an Albuquerque Western-wear business that grew into a 23-store chain in five states.

Roberta Cooper majored in Italian and philosophy at the University of Colorado, where she met Barry Ramo, a medical resident whose father was a Denver physician. (His aunt and uncle are Virginia and Simon Ramo, as in the R in TRW.)

They married and moved to Chicago, where Barry did his cardiology residency and Roberta was one of six women in her law school class.

Later, in North Carolina, where her husband had a fellowship at Duke University, Ramo was turned down by law firms.

“I remember interviewing with one fellow who misread his list and probably thought it said ‘Robert’ and was really nice and explained there was just no way his firm would ever consider hiring a woman,” she recalls.

She eventually found a job with the Ford Foundation, then spent two years teaching constitutional law at historically black Shaw University in Raleigh during the civil rights struggle.

“That was one of the most moving experiences of my life,” she says. “They weren’t just college students then. They were on the streets and at the lunch counters.”

After Ramo’s husband was drafted in 1970--and posted in San Antonio--she was hired by a firm there to practice business law.

That was also when she started applying systems analysis to law office management.

“You can’t grow up in the retail family I grew up in and not worry about serving customers,” she explains. “My sisters and I worked in my father’s store at an early age. I’m sure by the time I was 6, I was in there dusting cowboy boots and pricing things.”

J. Harris Morgan remembers meeting Ramo in the early ‘70s at a bar seminar where he discussed law office management.

“A young lady who was considerably pregnant came up and said she had just done a system like this for a firm,” Morgan says. “She had tremendous drive.”

At Morgan’s urging, Ramo joined the ABA and wrote a highly successful management book.

By 1972, the Ramos were in Albuquerque, where she worked for a large firm, then spent three years in private practice--all on a part-time basis.

Her chief concern, she says, was to spend time with her children. Joshua, now 25, works for Newsweek, while Jennifer, 23, a USC graduate, works for a community service coalition in Los Angeles.

Although Ramo resists preaching about the status of women lawyers, she urges firms to take the long view with their female associates.

“Their investment in a new lawyer is enormous,” she says. “Be flexible with them in their child-rearing years. The firms that are flexible will reap an enormous harvest later.”

Despite career and child-rearing commitments, Ramo found time to serve as president of the University of New Mexico board of regents, the Albuquerque Bar Assn. and the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra.

From 1977 to 1993, Ramo was a partner in the firm of Poole, Kelly & Ramo. She spent much of that time as managing partner, putting her theories on how to run a law firm into practice.

Surprisingly, the firm’s breakup last summer didn’t interfere with her attempts to secure votes on the ABA nominating committee.

“Law firms are very fragile organisms,” she says. “If everybody doesn’t agree on the base lines, there’s no way you can convince them to stay together.”

In the fall of 1993, she moved to the Modrall law firm, Albuquerque’s largest.

*

When Ramo takes over as president, she’ll be spending more time than ever on the road, frequently visiting ABA offices in Washington and Chicago.

A big part of the job will be public relations--pleading the case of a profession that has changed drastically since she got her start.

Where a lawyer once needed only a desk, a phone and the services of a typist to set up shop, law firms now depend on high-tech gadgetry--but that has led to greater cash needs and more costly legal services.

Economics aside, the popularity of dead lawyer jokes bespeaks the widespread assumption that lawyers are dishonest and hinder the workings of justice.

“I think the public needs to understand what the system is supposed to do,” she says. “What we’ve not done a very good job of is communicating what lawyers do right. What gets the notoriety is the 1% of things that don’t work.”