Washington Lawyer - January/February 2020 - 43

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
godfather of techno. Standing next to him in
the audience was James Gray, an attorney who
became his mentor. "He really encouraged me
to engage with the techno scene while having
a 'respectable career.' He showed me how to find
that balance," Ross explained.
After passing the LSAT, Ross enrolled at Syracuse
University College of Law and graduated in 2003.
He decided on Syracuse because its relative
geographical isolation helped him focus on his
studies. Still, music became a major part of his
wellness regimen. During an internship, he
earned enough money to buy a mini iPod. He
loaded it with some of his favorite tunes, which
became the soundtrack to his six-days-a-week
workouts.
After law school, Ross had to decide whether to
return to Michigan or pursue his law career elsewhere. Because job options were limited in
Michigan, he opted for Washington, D.C., in
part because his sister was studying forensic
science in the District. He had already visited
the city to attend a few international conferences and a moot court competition.
"I just saw way more opportunities here," Ross
said. "I saw tons of attorneys here. But there are
attorneys who didn't follow the traditional path.
That was interesting to me because I had always
taken a broad perspective of the legal field
beyond just preparing for a trial and going
to court."

Ross landed a job at the business consulting
firm ARPC, now Ankura Consulting Group.
He stayed there for a year before moving
to Maryland, where he practiced real estate
and bankruptcy law at Ward Pratz &
Associates, P.A. and at Robert A. Ades and
Associates, P.C. In May 2017 he started
working at the EPA.
Because the EPA has been under a lot of
scrutiny in recent years, Ross says work isn't
entirely stress-free. "You will always be perfecting that work-life balance to determine
what actually works for you," Ross said. "But
even at the EPA, where a work-life balance is
built into the system, there are many times
when music really becomes my main stress
releaser."

REACHES FOR THE LIMIT
By Debra Bruno

sk attorney Alice Loughran
how she did in her most recent
100-mile ultramarathon, and
she'll immediately admit, somewhat
sheepishly, that she had to speed
walk the last 20 or so miles.
Sure, she completed the Yeti 100 Mile
Endurance Run along the Virginia Creeper Trail
beginning in Abington, Virginia, in a little over
27 hours nonstop and faced elevations in the
Appalachian Mountains that were twice the
height of the Empire State Building, and sure,
she ran through the night, but Loughran, 52,
claims she's slowing down.
Those who know Loughran, a partner in
Steptoe & Johnson LLP's litigation and regulatory and industry affairs departments in
Washington, D.C., would not be surprised by
any of this. In fact, Loughran could be called
one of the most extreme of extreme athletes,
especially in the rarified world of high-powered
lawyers who have brought cases all the way
to the U.S. Supreme Court.
At the end of September, Loughran ran her
fifth 100-miler, a killer of a race that began on
a Friday morning, meandered through the
mountains of southwestern Virginia on trails
that had been created in part from former
railroad tracks, and finally ended Saturday
morning. Her thoughts on it? "Lots of fun -
gorgeous scenery and great people," she
emailed after the event.

Patrice Gilbert Photography

The day Ross officially moved to Washington
in 2006, he saw techno DJ Richie Hawtin spin
at the now-defunct Dupont Circle nightclub
Five. Ross took his sister to the show, and
there he met other people in the techno
scene.

ALICE LOUGHRAN

shows up in her running. "I try to see how far I
can push myself at these running events."

But how did she get interested in running
100 miles at once in the first place? "The way
I think about it," Loughran says, sitting in her
sunny D.C. office, "once I did marathons, I asked,
should I try something more? Should I try a
50K and then a 50-miler?"

Even before her legal career and the ultrarunning, Loughran was pushing herself. Before law
school, she spent a few years serving in the
Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic.
Although she knew that she would eventually
go to law school, she wanted to broaden her
experiences.

That sense of looking for the next challenge is
part of a lawyer's nature, she says. In her case, it

"I wanted to see the world," she says. "And in
some ways I wanted to see whether the world

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

WASHINGTON LAWYER 43

Washington Lawyer - January/February 2020

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