As a newcomer to Microsoft Corp. in the late 1980s, lawyer Mary Snapp was awestruck during her first meeting with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, seeing the company's leaders gesture vigorously as they spoke with their trademark intensity.

"You're not in Kansas anymore," a colleague told her afterward.

The cliché was actually appropriate. A graduate of the University of Kansas, Snapp grew up in the small town of Newton, Kan., part of a family in which the favorite topics of conversation at Thanksgiving dinner include the Kansas Constitution and Kansas Jayhawks basketball.

She is better known in Redmond as one of Microsoft's top lawyers. As a corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, Snapp manages a team of about 75 lawyers and paralegals who handle legal matters involving all varieties of the flagship Windows operating system, from PCs to hand-held devices.

That gives Snapp another major responsibility -- overseeing the company's compliance with the consent decree that settled its landmark U.S. antitrust case. The role puts her at the center of a high-profile issue that has reshaped Microsoft's business.