Courting Young Lawyers

In a town where lawsuits seem to fly like leaves in a Santa Ana windstorm, it might appear to some that there are way too many lawyers out there already.

Not to the crowd talking writs and court briefs over rice and chicken breasts Friday in downtown Los Angeles, however.

Members of the Latino Lawyers Assn. were treating Hispanic law students to lunch at the Regal Biltmore Hotel. And they were urging them to work hard at enticing other Latinos into careers in law.

Only 3% of California’s 140,000 practicing attorneys are Latino, according to the 12-year-old association.

“If there’s a lesson to all of us it is the need to replicate ourselves,” said state Assembly Speaker Antonio R. Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), a keynote speaker at the luncheon. “Multiply your numbers. That’s what it’s all about.”

Listening intently were 60 Latino law students who are in town working as summer associates in local law offices. Some of those law firms are already courting the students in hopes they will come back to work full-time after they graduate.

“There’s been a long tradition of Latino lawyers going to work in the Latino community where they’ve become good role models,” said association leader Roberto Tercero, who is enforcement office branch chief for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Los Angeles office.

“But in the next generation of Latino lawyers, you’ll see them joining larger law firms, government agencies like the SEC” and Fortune 500 companies--an evolution that will benefit the Latino community as a whole, said Tercero, a Palms-area resident.

“I believe there’s an unfortunate sense among some Latinos that society is run by others. But the reality is that society is run by everybody.”

Across the hotel banquet room, Victor Viramontes agreed. He’s a third-year Yale law school student from Los Angeles who is clerking this summer at a downtown law office as he plans a career as a civil litigator.

As a teenage Loyola High School student, Viramontes frequently passed through downtown Los Angeles and gazed up at the Bunker Hill office towers.

“Those high-rises were so intimidating,” said Viramontes, 25. “You think, ‘I could never go there.’ But you can. These law firms are for us. They’re not intimidating. There are humans inside there.”

Second-year UCLA law student Eduardo Montelongo, 24, of South-Central Los Angeles, said he plans to work in public interest law. He said his career path was shaped by the 1992 riots.

“During the riots I got a sense of what chaos is,” he said. “The legal system can address the issues if things aren’t working. It can help attain things that may not be attainable any other way.”

Montelongo is working this summer with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, an organization involved with Latino civil rights issues. That’s also where Maribel Medina, incoming president of the Latino Lawyers Assn., is a staff attorney.

Medina said the passage of Proposition 209, which in 1996 ended preferential enrollment policies for minorities and caused a drop-off in Latino applications at University of California law schools, has added urgency to her group’s work.

Along with helping connect current Latino law students with large law firms, the association wants to help law schools recruit Latinos, said Medina, of Whittier.

Raul Perez, current lawyers association president, said the group is eager to see Latino lawyers widely distributed within the legal community.

“It’s important to have a presence in big firms, small firms, in all sectors and in all levels of government and politics,” said Perez, an Elysian Heights resident who specializes in employment law for a large Los Angeles law firm.

Perez credits a Latino lawyer from Fresno with serving as his mentor 15 years ago when he was a high school student active in get-out-the-vote drives in the San Joaquin Valley city. By the 10th grade, Perez had a summer job doing research for attorney Joel Murillo.

First-year USC law student Angela Martinez, who received a $3,000 scholarship from the lawyers association during Friday’s luncheon, said the hotel banquet room was filled with people she hopes to consider as mentors.

“I’m just in awe in seeing a sea of Latino faces of people who are so successful,” she told the crowd. “I see so many people I want to be like.”