Bar Service: Barbara Howard, a longtime leader in the ABA, prepares for her next role
Barbara Howard is a self-described bar junkie.
She began participating in the Cincinnati Bar Association as a student at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. She ultimately held leadership roles in that association, including serving as its president and as a member of its board of trustees.
She became just as active in the Ohio State Bar Association. She is a past president and member of its Board of Governors, and she has served on its council of delegates since 1985.
Howard has an equally long history of leadership in the ABA. She has served in the House of Delegates for nearly 40 years, and from 2020-2022, she was its chair. Among her other roles, she is a past chair of the Standing Committee on Specialization, the Standing Committee on Meetings and Travel, and the Standing Committee on Membership.
“What I’ve always loved about bar service is we’re paying it forward in the sense that we’re helping the future of our profession—and frankly, the future of our country—by doing what we do and doing it well,” she says.
Howard is continuing to pay it forward. She was selected as the ABA president-elect nominee by the House Nominating Committee at the association’s midyear meeting in February. She will face an uncontested vote by the full House at the ABA Annual Meeting in August.
Michelle Behnke is the current president-elect and will begin her one-year term as president when she takes over from ABA President Bill Bay at the close of the annual meeting. Behnke would pass the gavel to Howard after the 2026 ABA Annual Meeting.
“I have found that the lawyers who are active in the ABA are the cream of the crop,” says Howard, the principal at Barbara J. Howard Co. in Cincinnati. “So spending time with them, it inspires me and it energizes me. It makes me want to be a better lawyer.”
Opening doors
Howard grew up in Toledo, Ohio, surrounded by lawyers.
Her father and her grandfather had a law practice. Her other grandfather and her uncle also had a law practice. They were both downtown, across the street from each other.
At a time when most women worked as teachers or nurses, Howard knew she wanted to be a lawyer too.
“And to the credit of my family, no one said, ‘Well, you’re a female, you can’t do that,’” says Howard, who graduated from law school in 1979.
She started her career at Beckman Weil Shepardson, a small firm in Cincinnati where she handled general civil matters. She began working with a partner who practiced family law, and when he retired, she took over those cases for the firm.
More than 40 years later, Howard still focuses exclusively on family law.
“When a door’s open, walk through it,” says Howard, quoting advice she now shares with others. “Just because it isn’t the door you thought it was going to be, don’t pass it up.”
Howard, who opened her firm in 1996, sees the difference she makes in the lives of her clients and their children, she says. Clients from 30 years ago still send her Christmas cards. Others refer their children to her when they are going through their own divorces.
“We have clients who are really good people at their probably absolute worst, and we get them to a much better place, a place they could probably not get to on their own,” Howard says.
History of service
Howard attended her first ABA meeting as a delegate to the Young Lawyers Division Assembly from the Cincinnati Bar Association in 1984.
She began her long tenure in the House a couple of years later when she became the Ohio State Bar Association’s young lawyer delegate. She served as chair of the House of Delegates’ Credentials and Admissions Committee, Select Committee, and Committee on Issues of Concern to the Legal Profession. She also was a longtime member of its Nominating Committee.
Howard became chair of the House at the end of the ABA’s first virtual meeting during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. She led two virtual House of Delegates sessions and one hybrid session during her term, which she describes as experiences she hopes no one has again, “That is a fabulous job, being chair of the House,” Howard says. “You make the best of it, and you have fun with it, because that’s what you want to do. But it was a challenge.”
Howard has done other memorable work with the ABA, including chairing the Standing Committee on Strategic Communications from 1996-1997. She says the group helped establish the association’s motto: “Defending liberty, pursuing justice.”
She also was a member of the Strategic Planning Committee, which in 2023 set out to create a plan that will shape the future of the ABA. Through this work, she had the opportunity to talk with lawyers across the ABA and in different practice areas about their hopes for the association. “I talked to lawyers who are in disciplines completely different than mine to find out what they do, how they view the work of the ABA and what’s important to them as we move forward,” Howard says. “It was really, really helpful in understanding the various aspects of the ABA.”
Future plans
First as ABA president-elect and then as president, Howard hopes to help implement the three goals of the association’s strategic plan. These goals are to be a home for all lawyers and create inclusive member communities; to maintain the ABA’s role as the voice of the legal profession, justice system and rule of law; and to build and support a strong association.
“There’s a lot of great work to do,” Howard says. “We’ll be seeing where are the needs that are pressing us right now that we must address. And then, how do we move things forward so that we stay relevant and healthy as an association?”
Howard lives in Cincinnati with her significant other, Mike Belmont, who also has attended many ABA functions. In fact, she says, they bought the land for their Hilton Head, South Carolina, vacation home in during a Young Lawyers Division meeting in the late 1980s.
She adds that the ABA and its work remain especially vital in the current political climate. “I don’t know that there is any other group that has the gravitas to address the issues of the rule of law, and the importance of our democracy’s foundation, separation of powers and judicial independence that are the foundation of our country,” she says.
This story was originally published in the June-July 2025 issue of the ABA Journal under the headline: “Bar Service: Barbara Howard, a longtime leader in the ABA, prepares for her next role.”
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