|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Ronald Martinez’s grandparents were field workers in Northern California. His parents were the first in their families to attend college. Their aspiration for their son was that he would become a high school teacher, coach football, and live next door. If Martinez wanted a different path, it would mean leaving an extended family that had never lived more than a few miles apart.
Today, Martinez is more than 2,300 miles east, serving as managing counsel – litigation overseeing all litigation at Vanderbilt University. It’s a school that the lawyer had never heard of when he was applying to the only college he considered for his undergraduate studies: Fresno State.
“You just have to understand the mentality of a small-town kid,” the AGC explains. “Fresno State was the only school I applied to because, in my reality, there wasn’t anywhere else to go. I certainly didn’t think I’d end up going to law school. People who come from my background don’t often have the connections or perspective to think much larger than what we can see.”
He’s not passing judgment on where he grew up. Martinez lived at home until he was twenty-three and clearly has a deep love and appreciation for his roots. But rural parts of the US often don’t provide the same wide-ranging opportunities and possibilities of larger urban regions. Martinez wasn’t sure what his future should be, but he knew the available options didn’t feel right.
“I didn’t have a safety net,” Martinez says. “I grew up in a lower-class household. My parents worked very hard, but I had to be practical about finding a career.”
Initially, Martinez, a bio major, figured optometry would provide the secure future he sought. There was just one problem. He was miserable.
Eventually, he decided to lean into the competitive spirit that had stuck with him from years of athletics. Law seemed like a continuation of that competition. At least that’s how it looked on TV.
The law according to sitcoms or police procedurals was all Martinez had to go on. He had no idea about how to apply for law school, let alone what to expect.
“It’s so important to mentor people. I think about myself in law school,” the lawyer explains. “I’m not complaining, but I was disadvantaged. There’s just not another word for it. I didn’t know how important your first year of law school is. I didn’t know that that first year can dictate so much of your future.”
Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, Martinez’s experience included a clerkship; an AM 100 law firm; a brief foray into plaintiff law, where he realized that despite working at a firm that used jets to fly from Sacramento to San Francisco (an eighty-seven-mile trip), the pace and way of life were not for him; and a stint as chief assistant county counsel for Yolo County, where he found real satisfaction.
It is this breadth of experience that Martinez credits with his success. “Even if you don’t have the best academic pedigree or connections in the industry, you need to find your advantage. Never say no to an assignment or an opportunity,” he says. “History is littered with very successful people who capitalized on serendipitous opportunities.”
Martinez says if he and his family hadn’t wanted to experience life outside his home state, he would have likely retired from his previous role. But having had little chance to see the rest of the country in his forty years, it was time to venture east.
In coming to Vanderbilt, Martinez walked into some unexpected challenges. Two attorneys with an accumulated seventy-plus years of legal experience at the university retired. One left just a week after Martinez started.
These hurdles didn’t keep the lawyer from immediately getting to work. Martinez says there was a massive opportunity to modernize the labor and employment practices, policies, and procedures.
“This was a unit that had figured out how to operate consistently over a long period of time,” Martinez explains. “That’s a credit to the quality of the team. But with some new perspective, I found that we had opportunities to modernize our operations.”
Martinez’s background in California, one of the most litigious regions in the country, prepared him well for helping Vanderbilt. “To be honest, there are matters where California employers have sorted themselves out that we had not faced in the same way out here,” the AGC explains. “I was trusted to come here and make some changes, and I appreciate that trust.”
As much as Martinez loves his new role and Nashville, he knows he’ll always feel the call of the Central Valley.
But should the attorney ever make the trip back home, he’ll have done so with a family of his own, on their own terms. Before he left home Martinez couldn’t have known the life that was out there for him if he was willing to outwork everyone around him. Now, if he decides to buy a house next to his parents, he will have done it his way.
At Matheny Sears Linkert & Jaime, LLP we take pride in our reputation as innovative and successful trial attorneys with decades of litigation experience. Three of our partners are members of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA), and many of our other attorneys have first-chaired their own trials. We have earned a statewide reputation for effective defense strategies that produce favorable resolutions, including dispositive motions and favorable settlements. If a case must be tried, we are fully prepared to take the case to a jury-even on short notice-and are proud of our track record.
