April 2020 Newsletter: Fleeing Civil War to a Fulfilling Life in North Texas

Civil War in El Salvador during the 1980s caused my family to move away when I was 3 years old. By the time my family was able to leave, things in El Salvador had gotten bad. There were gangs recruiting in the streets and people disappearing, so when my father’s employer, Texas Instruments, offered him a position here in North Texas, taking it was a no-brainer.

My dad was so thankful Texas Instruments gave him the opportunity to move his family to North Texas that he ended up working for them for 40 years. For the most part, my sisters and I grew up in North Texas, and I’ve been in this area almost all my life. I attended Baylor University in Waco and only briefly left the State to attend Notre Dame Law School in Indiana. Even then, I only left because Notre Dame offered me a sizable scholarship.

It was hard to be away from home, and today, I am happy to say that my husband, my two daughters, and I live right here in the North Texas community where I was raised, just a neighborhood over from my parents, my sister, and my in-laws. After graduating law school, I returned to North Texas and practiced family law and then criminal law, but I didn’t love either of those two areas of practice. Next, I went to the defense side of injury law. In that role, I was exposed to a variety of big cases that required me to learn about new things, which I greatly enjoyed.

It wasn’t until I worked on a case in which my client was both a claimant and a defendant, though, that I realized how much I preferred representing plaintiffs. Through representing that client, I realized I could actually help people in tough situations, whose physical health, careers, and daily lives had been affected by their injuries, go up against insurance companies, and recover what they had lost. I never looked back..