Ana Romes, an associate with Foley & Lardner's Miami office. Photo: J. Albert Diaz/ALM

William Shakespeare famously wrote "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" in his comedy "As You Like It." The passage the line derives from also notably observed "one man in his time plays many parts."

Gender discrepancy aside, it's an aphorism Ana Romes, an associate with Foley & Lardner's Miami office, is familiar with firsthand. Beyond her status as a bona fide theater scholar, Romes spent much of her life in positions with debatable degrees of relation to her present role with the international law firm's Business Litigation & Dispute Resolution Practice.

"I didn't enter law school until I was almost 40 years old," Romes said, adding a legal job was something she came to "fairly late in life." Change has been a constant for Rome since the very beginning. As the daughter of a career U.S. Air Force officer, she found herself moving with her family at a regular pace.

Romes said Miami had the distinction of being one of the only consistent fixtures of her upbringing. As her father's birthplace and the longstanding home of much her mother's family, Romes frequently found herself in the Magic City even as her place of residence routinely rotated.

The transience of Romes' biography can also be glimpsed in her passion for the performing arts, itself a craft that requires its adherents to occupy a variety of parts both on the stage and off.

"I was singularly focused on being an actress," Romes said. "I started out in theater as a performer. It was my focus in undergraduate and was what I thought that I would want to end up doing."

Romes' studies brought her to Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and the University of Texas at Austin, where she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in drama and theater for youth and communities in 2003. Her theater work also saw her spend many years in Nicaragua throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, where she applied the techniques she'd acquired touring and performing toward community-oriented educational initiatives.

"I went [to the University of Texas at Austin] specifically to study how you can use the process of theater to create dialogue and to create change," Romes said. "Even though I was changing from being an actress to a facilitator of educational experiences, … that was all one very fluid piece in my mind."

As a graduate student, Romes utilized her skill set to raise awareness regarding reproductive health among Nicaraguan youth.

Even with all of the blood, sweat, tears and years she put into her adoptive Central American home, Romes situated herself in Miami not long after completing her graduate studies. It was here that she began walking the path that would guide her toward becoming a litigator.

"My grandmother was a court reporter for the State Attorney's Office, and my aunt was Janet Reno's assistant for a very long time," Romes said of her initial connections to the legal field. After arriving in Miami and moving in with her aunt, she soon began working for the Miami Police Department.

"Because I spoke Spanish and I had worked as a volunteer and in paid positions at domestic violence shelters and other places in the United States, the police department signed me on," she said. Romes was placed as a victim advocate in the law enforcement office's homicide unit, where she worked with family members of homicide victims and sufferers of domestic violence.

She said the demands of the job proved to be "fairly grueling" on an emotional level and began to take a toll on her health.

"I had to kind of step back and think in order for me to do a next step to do anything, I'm going to need to go back to school," Romes said. "I started to think about a legal career because it seemed to me — as someone with no attorneys in her family — that it would be a wonderful place to be a creative thinker, to constantly be learning, and to advocate for people in a different way than I had been advocating."

Romes admitted she didn't know if her career gamble would ultimately pay off.

"I thought, 'Well why not? I can try it, I don't know how it works. I don't know if it will work, but let me try it,'" she said. "And it worked."

After enrolling at the University of Miami School of Law, Romes acted as a student advocate with the school's Immigration Clinic and interned with the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office as well as the National Women's Law Center's Family Economic Security Program. Upon graduating magna cum laude, she joined Shutts & Bowen as an associate and subsequently clerked for U.S. District Judge Robert Scola in the Southern District of Florida.

Although Romes acknowledges the stark contrast between her life on stage versus the courtroom, she hasn't disassociated from her past and passion entirely. She was elected to serve on the Board of Theatre for Young Audiences/USA, an organization dedicated to promoted youth-oriented performing arts programs, in July.

Romes also believes the time spent immersed in characters and stories different from her own helped to prepare her for successfully advocating on behalf of clients.

"I think you would have to ask someone else to know if it's totally true, but I think that I bring to my practice a very unique ability to understand all sides of the story," she said. "Even if we're advocating for a particular client, a particular version of the facts or an interpretation of the facts, I can get what the other side is saying. And that makes me, I think, able to fight it better. Because I think that that theater, for anyone, opens up your mind to very different ways of seeing the world, very different ways of experiencing the world and very different ways of interpreting facts. And you can transfer that kind of skill over to theater, and then over to the legal profession."

Ana Romes 

Born: September 1972, Sacramento, California

Spouse: Maritza Lacayo

Children: Sebastian Romes-Lacayo, Ixchel Romes-Lacayo

Education: University of Miami School of Law, J.D., 2012; The University of Texas at Austin, M.F.A., 2003; Gettysburg College, B.A., 1994

Experience: Associate, Foley & Lardner, 2017-present; Law Clerk, United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, 2016-2017; Associate, Shutts & Bowen, 2013-2016; Judicial Clerk, Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal, 2012-2013.

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