Lawyer brings experience as a Cuban immigrant to work with Hispanic community
Jany Martínez-Ward’s first encounter with the law was in 1999, when her family crossed the border between Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas, and was immediately detained.
U.S. immigration officials separated Martínez-Ward and her infant brother from their mother for questioning. After a few hours, they told Martínez-Ward that she and her brother would go to foster care while their mother remained in detention.
“That was so scary because I didn’t speak English,” says Martínez-Ward, who was 14 at the time. “I had police officers dressed in uniform telling me things that I didn’t comprehend, making decisions about my life. I was being sent to a stranger’s house, and I couldn’t talk to them.”
Martínez-Ward came to the United States seeking political asylum. Originally from Cuba, she moved with her family to Venezuela to escape Fidel Castro’s regime when she was 9. Shortly after Hugo Chávez came into power in Venezuela, her mother told her they needed to go somewhere safer and more stable again.
Martínez-Ward and her brother were in foster care for about a month before their mother was released from immigration detention. Once reunited, they traveled three days by bus to Miami and stayed with an uncle who rented a motel room in the area.
While waiting for their asylum case to be approved, Martínez-Ward’s mother got a job at a mattress factory and eventually moved the family into a small apartment. Martínez-Ward also started working at a nearby flea market but says her primary focus was studying and getting straight A’s.
Because of the challenges her family faced at the border and as new immigrants, Martínez-Ward already knew she wanted to be a lawyer.
“I wish during that time that somebody would have sat down and explained to me, like, ‘This is what’s happening to you,’ in terms that I could understand,” Martínez-Ward says. “So I’ve made it a career and my purpose in life.”
Jany Martínez-Ward is co-owner of the Ward Law Group with her husband, Gregory Ward. The firm, which has more than 200 employees and offices in Miami; Orlando, Florida; and New York City, primarily represents Hispanic victims of car accidents and other serious personal injury cases.
Positive influence
Today, Martínez-Ward is co-owner of the Ward Law Group with her husband, Gregory Ward. The firm, which has more than 200 employees and offices in Miami; Orlando, Florida; and New York City, primarily represents Hispanic victims of car accidents and other serious personal injury cases.
After graduating from Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law in 2012, Martínez-Ward returned to Miami and realized there weren’t a lot of lawyers who spoke Spanish, she says. At that time, there were even fewer female Spanish-speaking lawyers, she says.
“I felt like the Spanish community, even though it was a big Spanish community, was not represented, because nobody was able to talk about the laws and their rights in Spanish,” says Martínez-Ward, who adds that translators helped with a lot of the legal work.
Martínez-Ward and her husband, whom she met while in law school and married in 2012, aimed to change that by advertising and communicating with clients in Spanish. She now handles pre-lawsuit negotiation, while her husband leads the litigation team.
As their firm’s spokesperson, Martínez-Ward also appears regularly on Spanish-language television networks Telemundo and Univision to answer her community’s legal questions. One popular topic has involved automated cars and what passengers can do if they’re in an accident, she says.
Martínez-Ward wanted the Hispanic community to be reflected inside the firm too. Most of its employees are bilingual and women, she says. Many held previous jobs outside of the legal profession, including in a pharmacy and at a car wash.
“We are pulling from the community and training them to help their own community,” Martínez-Ward says. “It’s a beautiful story.”
Martínez-Ward and her husband have 9-year-old twins who also appear in commercials for the firm. She says both the twins and her 19-year-old stepdaughter want to be lawyers.
Keeping the faith
Martínez-Ward serves as a role model for the community in other ways.
She is a member of the board of directors for the I Have A Dream Foundation of Miami, which helps children from low-income areas reach their educational and career goals. She supports her firm’s annual back-to-school donation drive for children locally as well as its efforts to provide food and other resources to children in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Through this work, Martínez-Ward says she hopes to inspire young people to pursue an education or whatever goals they have set for themselves.
She shares that she wouldn’t have become a lawyer if she listened to a 10th grade teacher who told her that her English wasn’t good enough to get into the University of Florida, she says. But Martínez-Ward, who had taken English for Speakers of Other Languages classes, believed that if she kept working hard, she could defy that teacher’s expectations.
Martínez-Ward ended up receiving a full scholarship to the University of Florida, where she studied psychology and Spanish literature.
“Faith is very important, and [so is] believing in yourself and not listening to all the ‘no’s,’” Martínez-Ward says. “If you push yourself and you have grit, this is an amazing country that still gives a lot of opportunities.”
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