In brief: Barbara Roman is a hometown girl. She was born and raised in South Euclid; worked in retail at Severance Center for $1.25 an hour; attended The Ohio State University and married Nick Roman, an All-American defensive end who played in the NFL with the Cincinnati Bengals and Cleveland Browns; and earned her law degree from Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. “I am a Clevelander and proud of it,” she says. A partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis, she is also the incoming president of the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association.
⊲ NFL dreams: Roman was studying psychology in preparation to get a Ph.D., but her first husband’s NFL career changed the course of hers as well. Together with other NFL wives, including a female lawyer, she participated in starting a nonprofit organization to do community service through the Browns. “It was that exposure to seeing a woman working on the project, having a family and balancing a career that really got me interested in the practice of law,” she says.
⊲ Family law: Roman’s career began at the Ohio Attorney General’s office in the Consumer Protection Division, where she worked to require the disclosure of rebates when advertising or selling motor vehicles. But when she joined a firm and opened her own practice, she went into family law because that’s where most of her professional contacts were.
⊲ Problem solving: Roman is a certified domestic relations mediator and practices collaborative law, in which two lawyers deal with each other and the family to resolve conflict outside the courtroom. “I think lawyers need to be problem solvers, not problem creators,” she says. “I have tried to build my practice as a consensus builder instead of a litigator. Many times that means I’m counseling people through life’s problems.”
⊲ Risk and reward: “It can be draining. You have to take pride in the successes you have to get through the difficult moments when the tension is so high.” Recently Roman got a note in the mail from an 18-year-old man thanking her for how she handled his parents’ divorce 14 years earlier. “I had structured the arrangement so his father had primary custody,” she says, “because I could see the father had more interest in the child. The boy wrote to me to say how I had changed his life for the better.”
⊲ Memorable case: Roman represented a young man at Bowling Green State University. “He had a usual college romance with a young girl that resulted in pregnancy,” Roman says. “He did everything he could to get her to marry him. She wouldn’t agree.” She wanted to terminate the pregnancy or put the child up for adoption. Roman followed the case through to the Supreme Court. But the woman used her dual citizenship to leave the U.S. and put the child up for adoption. The father had no rights in the other country. “The child is now 18 years old and is still in another country, and it’s getting to a point where the child can open records.”
⊲ Madame president: She takes over as president of the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association, which includes almost 6,000 attorneys, in summer 2011. “I’m looking forward to serving as president of the Bar because I like being a leader,” she says.
⊲ After hours: “I travel a lot.” She and her second husband of 18 years, Richard Dorman, just got back from a trip down the Danube. She visited eight countries in Eastern Europe. “I love photography,” she says. “I love to take pictures of people and places.”
⊲ Lawyer jokes? “I’ll laugh at them, but I don’t think it’s fair that lawyers are always the target.”