Ralph C Thomas III

Ralph was raised in Frederick, Maryland.  After graduation from high school, he served in the U.S. Air Force for the next four years.  During that time he was stationed in Texas, Illinois, Vietnam and Japan.  He achieved the rank of Staff Sergeant (E-5).  After his honorable discharge, he enrolled in college on Maui, Hawaii, where he was an investigator for the Maui Public Defender.  After receiving an Associate of Arts degree, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a Parole Aide for the California Youth Authority.  He graduated from Berkeley with honors and then attended Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  At Harvard Ralph was very active in Drama.  He also represented veterans before military review boards under the school's Committee on Military Justice organization.  After graduating from Harvard, he worked as an associate in a Washington, D.C. law firm that concentrated on antitrust and trade regulation issues.  Two years later he started his own law firm, Thomas John & Everett where he handled a number of high profile cases. He also appeared frequently as a consumer law expert on a  TV consumer protection program called "Dollars and Sense." He then served for the next seven years as the Executive Director of the National Association of Minority Contractors, a group of nation-wide minority-owned construction firms headquartered in Washingon, D.C.  After that, Ralph was appointed as Associate Administrator for Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization at NASA Headquarters, where he received much acclaim for expanding NASA's competitive base of contractors to include more small, minority, and women owned firms.  In 2005, after 13 years at NASA, Ralph returned to practicing law while maintaining his expertise in increasing contract awards to all categories of small businesses. Ralph has conducted more than one hundred training seminars for small businesses.  He has written about 80 articles on small business issues and testified a number of times in Congress about how proposed legislation would impact small businesses.  Internationally, Ralph has spoken at conferences in a number of foreign countries including Hungary, India, Saudi Arabia, Finland, Switzerland, Brazil, Turkey, England, and Canada.  In 2009 Ralph was admitted into the Bar of the Supreme Court of England and Wales.  He also racewalked a 26.2 mile marathon in Negril, Jamaica.