Virginia Lawyers Weekly

Growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s in a small town in Texas, Sandra Rohrstaff never thought about working at anything other than the jobs educated women had at the time: nurse, teacher or secretary.

“It never occurred to me that I could go to law school,” she recalled. “I had never seen a woman lawyer.”

After graduating from the University of Texas in 1968, she moved to Northern Virginia, where she worked first as a secretary in a three-lawyer personal injury firm and then as a pre-school teacher in a private school.

She returned to work in a law firm as a secretary for Bernard S. Cohen, a now-retired Alexandria lawyer and former state delegate, who “nurtured, supported and encouraged” her in her ambition to become a lawyer. She earned her law degree in 1990 by attending classes at night at Catholic University while working full time at the firm.

She joined the firm, since dissolved, as an associate and later as a partner and says she has found the practice of law to be everything she hoped it would be “and more.”

Rohrstaff was installed as the president of the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association during its 50th anniversary celebration. Only two other women – Betty Thompson of Arlington and Mary Lynn Tate of Abingdon – have been president of the organization.

She has been a partner in the four-attorney Fairfax firm of Weiner, Rohrstaff & Spivey PC for what she says are “a couple of very happy years.”

Rohrstaff said she knew from the start of her legal career that she wanted to represent people and do trial work.

As a result, “I was committed to VTLA from very early on” and “did whatever I could to participate in it,” she said.

“It really gives you access to smart lawyers all over the state and elsewhere,” she said. She has never asked for help from a member that she didn’t get, she said. “It’s one of the most generous groups I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.”

Her early career included criminal law, domestic relations and commercial litigation for small firms, but her work now is exclusively personal injury and medical malpractice.

She said one of her most satisfying cases remains her representation of an Ecuadoran national who was charged with passing counterfeit money. He was with a group drinking beer at a bar when one of the men handed the waitress a phony hundred-dollar bill.

Her client, who had lost an arm and a knee cap in an electrical accident, was unaware of the counterfeiting and was the only member of the group who was acquitted, she said.

Nevertheless, he was detained as an illegal immigrant pending trial and spent months in prison, much of the time in solitary confinement.

After his acquittal she apologized for the treatment he had received. “You don’t understand,” he told her. “In my country, I never would have made it to trial.”

“His family sent me a little bouquet of flowers,” she said.

Her interaction with other lawyers and clients such as the immigrant are rewarding parts of her work, she said, but the opportunity to learn new things – how the pump that raises the bed on a dump truck works, for example – add to her enjoyment of it.

Providing the opportunity to learn new things is an important aspect of VTLA, she said.

The organization offers “exceptional educational opportunities for lawyers… . We have a lot of people who are not VTLA members coming to us for training” through such programs as its seminars and the Virginia College of Trial Advocacy, for which she has served as a faculty member since 2002.

Working with those non-VTLA members and with other bar groups is essential, she said. “If we don’t work with others, we’re going to harbor the seeds of our own demise,” she said. “I’m a teacher at heart. I came to the law in an inclusive way.”

That inclusiveness can take the form of partnering with groups such as the Virginia Bar Association in the Virginia Family Law Coalition and in indigent criminal defense reform, she said.

She noted the Just the Beginning Foundation, an organization with a goal of encouraging ethnic groups who are underrepresented in the legal profession to consider the law as a career, as an example of another group working to broaden the legal tent.

That spirit can spill over to cooperation with organizations more often considered adversaries of VTLA, such as casualty insurers and the Medical Society of Virginia and other healthcare organizations, she noted.

Of course, the cooperation sometimes is coerced, as it was in this session of the legislature on two longstanding issues – the cap on medical malpractice awards and what trial lawyers view as the lack of incentive for carriers of underinsured motorist coverage to participate fully in the negotiation and trial of a claim.

The message from legislators to both sides of those issues was to work it out among yourselves between now and the next General Assembly session or one or both of you might get a solution you don’t like.

That type of back and forth with legislators is fine with Rohrstaff. “How else are they going to figure it out if we don’t help them?” she said.

She said she believes the VTLA’s lobbyists “are listened to because we are well informed and articulate” and willing to negotiate with those who have different interests.

Rohrstaff acknowledged concern about the dwindling number of jury trials in the state – barely a quarter as many as there were as recently as 15 years ago.

She said she is not sure whether the decline “changes the focus or whether it should. … We’re not the Virginia Mediation Association.”

She said she still believes the starting point should be: “We go to trial. That’s the best way to get the issue resolved.”

On the other hand, she said, “We are trial lawyers who also can use the mediation tool on behalf of our clients.”

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