To Nadia Bermudez, 30, an associate attorney with the Brown Law Group Downtown, choosing a role model to emulate when she was younger was a simple matter of turning to her older sister. Ruth Montenegro, 40, is an attorney in El Centro, hometown of the Bermudez family.

Nadia, in turn, is a role model for her younger sister, Eran Bermudez, 27, an attorney with Best Best & Krieger, another Downtown law firm, and for a number of elementary and high school students to whom she speaks as a representative of the Lawyers Club of San Diego and the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association. “A lot of kids from low-income families don’t have attorneys in their families, so it is important for them to see people like themselves as attorneys,” says Bermudez, a graduate of Stanford Law School. She is fluent in Spanish. Her parents came to El Centro from Mexicali.

At the Brown Law Group, Bermudez represents employers in all types of employment-related litigation such as discrimination claims, wrongful termination, harassment and wage and hour violations. She has authored several articles for a number of legal industry publications.

But her volunteer work is an important part of her life. She has served as general counsel to the Centro Cultural de la Raza, been a volunteer attorney at the Chula Vista Domestic Violence & TRO Clinic and judges moot court competitions at the University of San Diego School of Law and Cal Western School of Law.