Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine - Res Ipsa Loquitur
Spring/Summer 2009 - Online Volume 1
Alumni
Spotlight: Robert Ruyak
In the space of about 12 days last fall, Howrey’s Robert Ruyak (L’74) traveled from Washington, D.C., to the West Coast and back — before getting on another plane bound for London. So when Georgetown Law caught up with him, we had to ask: Is this just par for the course when you’re the managing partner and chief executive officer of a global law firm?
“There is quite a bit of travel,” says Ruyak. “This was a little unusual [he made the London trip to attend the opening of the Center for Transnational Legal Studies as chair of Georgetown Law’s Board of Visitors], but I do try to get to the offices once every three months or so.”
Getting to “the offices” means nine in the United States, six in Europe and one in Asia. It’s a different firm than the one that existed when Ruyak became CEO in 2000, when the firm had a mere 350 attorneys in four U.S. cities; today, there are more than 750 lawyers (96 percent of whom are litigators) in 17 offices worldwide. A lot of the disputes Howrey lawyers litigate “are not just in the U.S. anymore; they’re really transnational and global,” Ruyak says.
It’s also a different world than the one that existed when Ruyak first joined the firm in 1976, after completing a clerkship with Watergate Judge John Sirica. Ruyak made partner at the firm in 1981 and, a few years later, got involved in management.
“I was very interested in seeing the firm expand beyond what it was, which was primarily an antitrust litigation firm, into other areas,” says Ruyak. “So with some of my peers, we tried pretty hard to expand the firm’s practices [into intellectual property, patent and major contractual disputes], and we were pretty successful.”
It’s a success that he could hardly have envisioned back in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he grew up and attended Gannon University. Always thinking ahead, he lived at home during college to save money for graduate school and — once he’d decided on a career in law — made an appointment with a local lawyer in Erie to ask for some advice.
“He wanted to know why I was there and I said, ‘I’m thinking about going to law school; what can you tell me?’” says Ruyak, the first in his family to enter the legal profession. “He kind of took me under his wing and met with me several times to help me with the thought process and the application process and where I should think about going to school.”
Fortunately, Ruyak picked Georgetown. “It was the height of the Vietnam War and war protests and there were a lot of constitutional issues that came to the front at that time,” he says. “Georgetown was at the center of the universe then; it was in Washington where policy was being made.”
At Georgetown Law, Professor Sherman Cohn, himself a former Erie resident, encouraged Ruyak to get involved in an appellate litigation clinic and a moot court program where students would try cases before a federal judge — who, in Ruyak’s case, turned out to be Sirica. This motivated Ruyak to apply for a clerkship with the judge and to do trial work, something he still enjoys.
“The challenge is being able to convince a group of people and a judge of the positions, both the law and the facts, of your client,” he says, adding that it’s a field where he’s constantly learning. “In every case you have to learn a new set of facts, the circumstances and the people and the industries. … It’s really incredibly invigorating.”
One of his most memorable cases was his representation, in the 1990s, of several major steel companies in an antitrust case. The railroads were preventing the steel companies from using independent shipping companies to transport their ore. “In my mind, it was a basic injustice that occurred, a violation of the antitrust laws,” he says.
He enjoys spending time with his family, which includes his wife Liz (G’79) and four adult children: Robert (C’99), Kathleen, Eric and Christopher (B’12), who is a freshman at Georgetown University this year. Ruyak has chaired the advisory boards of several institutions, including the Archdiocesan Legal Pro Bono Network and Georgetown Preparatory School, and has served on Georgetown Law’s Board of Visitors since 2001.
“It’s very important to do what we can as alumni of the school to help it remain one of the top schools in the country,” says Ruyak, who has been a generous contributor to the Sherman Cohn Endowed Scholarship Fund and has also been heavily involved in the Center for Transnational Legal Studies. He stays connected with the school, he says, because he simply enjoys it. “I love to meet professors and see the wonderful things they’re doing, the writing and research, being part of that wonderful academic community,” he says. “It’s very rewarding.”
