Growing up in Jackson, Wyoming, there was never much question about where life would begin. RAM Construction was family - not just in name, but in identity. From a young age, joining the company felt less like a choice than a calling, and Richard answered it with pride. He started where everyone starts in construction: at the bottom, doing the work with his hands. Over the years, he moved through nearly every dimension of the business, accumulating not just experience but something rarer - a ground-level fluency in how construction companies actually live and breathe, succeed and stumble.
"His father never pushed him toward law. He pushed him away from a life where the work wore you down before your time."
It was his father - a man who understood the cost of physical labor across decades - who planted the seed, not by pointing toward a destination, but by steering away from one. That nudge settled somewhere quiet and waited. In the meantime, there was a company to serve, and he served it fully, eventually becoming RAM's in-house counsel - a role that demanded he bridge two worlds most lawyers never have to: the jobsite and the courtroom, the contract and the concrete.
When his parents retired, the question of succession didn't have a clean answer. Taking over RAM wasn't financially viable. It was a pivotal moment - the kind that can feel like loss and opportunity arriving at the same time. Rather than wait for clarity, Richard made a decision: bet on himself. He founded Manning Law, built around the precise intersection of law and industry he had spent over three decades inhabiting. Construction law, business law, tax law - not as abstract disciplines, but as living systems he understood from the inside out.
The niche wasn't manufactured. It emerged organically from thirty years of knowing what contractors actually face, what small business owners actually need, and what the law looks like when it meets the real world of building things. His clients don't have to explain their industry to him. He already knows it - the disputes, the margins, the relationships, the risk.
Manning Law shares its home at 525 W. Elk Ave. with Gros Ventre Designs, the interior design firm of Richard's wife - a pairing that says something about how the Mannings operate: two builders, two practices, one roof. Together they are also the parents of thirteen-year-old triplets - two daughters and a son - the kind of daily reminder that the most important things you build don't have square footage.
Richard's education is as rooted in Wyoming as the man himself. From Wilson Elementary School through graduation at Jackson Hole High School, he never left the valley that shaped him. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration - with honors - from the University of Wyoming in 1993, before completing a rare concurrent program at UW that awarded him both his MBA from the College of Business and his J.D. from the College of Law simultaneously. Recognizing that tax law demands its own depth of mastery, he later pursued and earned an LL.M. in Taxation from Villanova University - rounding out a credential set that is as deliberately constructed as any building RAM ever put up.
Richard Manning is a product of this valley, shaped by its industry and committed to its people. In a region defined by those who build with their hands, he builds with both - still.
