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SOLO ACT: Three years out of
law school, Herrera opened her own practice.
Thad Russell |
Luz Herrera has no illusions
about the price she pays for her ideals. In real terms,
they cost her about $100,000 a year. That is money she
could use to rent or buy her own place. That is money
she could sock away for her parents, with whom she currently
resides. As she puts it, “I am their retirement
fund.”
But rather than pull down a six-figure salary as a
corporate lawyer, the Stanford- and Harvard-educated
Herrera earns about $26,000 per year as a sole practitioner
in Compton, Calif. She opened her office in May 2002,
not far from the epicenter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
It sits next to the Mega 99-Cent Discount Store and
down the street from plenty of boarded-up and dilapidated
buildings on Compton Boulevard.
Herrera, ’95, MA ’95, provides legal services—primarily
family law, estate planning, real estate and small business
transactions—to a largely underserved population.
More than a million Los Angeles County residents speak
Spanish at home and do not speak English well, according
to the U.S. Census Bureau. Although the State Bar of
California does not track numbers of Spanish-speaking
lawyers, a recent survey of its members found that there
are only about 7,000 Latino lawyers in the entire state.
This explains why many of Herrera’s clients—blue-collar
workers who remind her of her own relatives and neighbors—drive
to Compton from hours away, often with no clue as to
her educational pedigree. They are relieved to be able
to communicate fluently with the person translating
the U.S. legal system for them. Herrera charges her
“more sophisticated” clients $150 per hour.
In other cases, she charges flat fees based on the legal
matter at hand and the client’s financial situation—amounts
far below the $180 to $300 hourly rates she estimates
her Harvard Law School classmates command elsewhere.
“For [a client] who makes $10 or $12 an hour,
how can they even relate to that?” she says.
Herrera isn’t starry-eyed about her work. “I
don’t know how much longer I can do this, to be
honest. I’d be a lot more comfortable if I were
making money,” she says. “I share that pathetic
‘justice-for-all’ attitude,” she adds
with a wry smile.
The day before Thanksgiving, Herrera appeared in the
Riverside County courthouse representing a single mother
named Maria Gonzalez. A man had agreed to buy Gonzalez’s
house, then failed to make payments. After Gonzalez
sold the house to someone else, the man sued.
Herrera acknowledges that, as in many cases, neither
party has behaved perfectly. “I do feel [Gonzalez]
is being taken advantage of, but she also could have
done things differently to protect herself,” she
says. Nevertheless, as she makes clear to the judge,
she does believe her client deserves to prevail as a
matter of law.
Herrera makes a motion to dismiss the case, pointing
out that her opposing counsel has not complied with
any of her requests for documents. “We believe
that they don’t really have a case,” she
tells the judge.
A few minutes earlier, the judge was joking convivially
from the bench with another lawyer. But his tone turns
dismissive as he addresses Herrera (who, at 5-foot-2,
knows she looks younger than her 31 years). “What
you should have learned from the earlier cases that
were called is that the court does not entertain oral
motions,” he says. Herrera points out that she
has indeed filed a written motion. The judge, although
correcting himself, is unmoved.
“Think of what judges see when they look at my
name on a document,” Herrera muses later. A judge
sees her name and the city in which she practices. “Compton
is not known for its lawyers,” she says. He sees
Herrera’s bar number, indicating that she passed
the California bar exam rather recently. He doesn’t
see her educational credentials.
“For all he knows I just took a correspondence
course,” she says. “If my address said Beverly
Hills or even Costa Mesa, it’s like, okay, this
person competed with someone else to be here.”
Such slippery disadvantages compound the price of passing
up a law career in a ritzier locale. Not that Herrera
doesn’t put this perceived handicap to good use
when she can. Sometimes, she says, she lets opposing
attorneys underestimate her, “and then I go in
and kick their butts.”
Herrera grew up in Whittier, Calif., the only child
of two immigrants from Mexico. Sometimes, when she was
in grade school, her parents worked nights cleaning
local office buildings. Herrera accompanied them, completing
her homework at vacant desks.
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‘There isn’t
a day that I wake up when I don’t think,
“Am I going to make the right decisions
today?”’ |
A teacher noticed her sharp intelligence and urged
her into a gifted program. Herrera relied on scholarships
and grants to attend Stanford and Harvard. In both places,
she focused much of her energy on fighting for social
justice in a variety of forums.
After earning her law degree in 1999, she joined the
real estate department of a large San Francisco law
firm with a progressive reputation. She spent two years
there, but quickly became disillusioned. “The
problem with corporate law firms is that unless someone
takes you under their wing or you become a ‘yes’
person and lose your own identity, the chances for success
there are minimal,” she says. “It is heightened
if you have no partners or senior associates that look
like you. It works for some people, but I [had] worked
too hard to trade in my opinions and politics for a
six-figure salary.”
After leaving the firm, she traveled in Latin America
and worked for a sole practitioner in Huntington Park,
Calif., where she learned some family law. When another
sole practitioner retired, leaving his Compton office
available for rent, a sizable circle of former classmates,
professors and other boosters supported Herrera’s
decision to strike out on her own.
Gabriel Sandoval was one of the first to jump in, scrubbing,
mopping and painting Herrera’s modest new office.
He himself had given up a $165,000 job as an employment
lawyer to spearhead a Los Angeles city attorney’s
task force that combats fraud against immigrant communities,
and he urged Herrera to set aside financial concerns,
at least for now. “She has the ganas,
the passion, the will,” says Sandoval, ’93.
“You see the passion in her eyes. You can’t
deny that. You need to explore it. Who knows what will
come of it two or three years down the road?”
“I see her stretching beyond her wildest imagination.
The struggle is transforming her,” says Russell
Castañeda Calleros, ’94, the campus minister
for community services at Loyola Marymount University.
“The experience has shown her how important it
is not only to use her God-given strength, but to tap
into the strengths of other people.” When Herrera
needed an intern, for example, she had the student solicit
donations from Herrera’s friends and former colleagues.
The effort produced a $2,500 summer stipend.
But even with that kind of support, Herrera is very
much on her own. “It’s a daily lesson in
courage,” she says. “There isn’t a
day that I wake up when I don’t think, ‘Am
I going to make the right decisions today?’”
And representing legally unsophisticated clients, she
says, is challenging. “I often have difficulty
getting clients to focus on things that are important
to their case,” she says. “Most don’t
understand the legal process.” Add to that the
financial pressures of the practice, and it’s
clear why Herrera almost shuttered the office last fall.
But her work brings an occasional hard-won triumph.
The same day Herrera represented Maria Gonzalez in court,
she also saw a couple whose relationship had been so
strained several months earlier they could not sit in
the same room. On this day, the pair talked and laughed
nervously, relieved to see Herrera putting the finishing
touches on their divorce agreement.
After they left, Herrera said, “It wasn’t
always like this. It was ugly. He tried to run her over
with a car. We had restraining orders out. Their kids
had their own lawyers. I never thought I’d see
this day.” Often drawn and determined, Herrera’s
face momentarily relaxes into a wide, satisfied grin.
Still, Herrera is sketching out exit plans. “In
order to attract the more sophisticated client base,
I know I have to leave Compton,” she says. “Few
want to come park their BMW or Mercedes on Compton Boulevard.”
She hopes to lease a small second office, perhaps closer
to her home in Whittier, later this year—a place
where more affluent clients feel comfortable but where
Herrera can still charge reasonable fees. In two to
five years, she would like to leave behind a nonprofit
office in Compton where recent law school graduates
and paralegals could come to learn about “real-life”
legal work.
All of this, Herrera admits, is subject to change.
She keeps in mind something a friend once told her:
“If you make plans, God will laugh at you.”
Or, in her own words, “I expect the unexpected.”
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