In May 2006, Joseph Casas left a good job as a local litigation associate defending Fortune 500 companies for the national law firm McKenna, Long & Aldridge. Spurred by his entrepreneurial spirit, he founded Casas Law Group and hoped that those who had encouraged him would bring their legal work to the man called “the entrepreneur’s lawyer.”

Within a week, Casas heard from the family of one of the “Pendleton Eight” — Marines facing court-martial on alleged offenses committed in Iraq’s Hamdaniya Province. Casas got the job based on experience. As a corporal in the Marine Corps Reserves, he earned concurrent degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law and Stuart School of Business. Commissioned a lieutenant in the Navy, he was prosecutor in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps for three years.

That engagement helped jump-start Casas’ new law firm.

Casas, 32, now represents dozens of small to mid-sized enterprises ranging from technology, marketing and media companies to after-school education programs and nonprofits. “Being an entrepreneur is do-or-die, but I wouldn’t change it for the world,” he says.

He is board chair of the San Diego Hispanic Chamber of Commerce; director of the Alzheimer’s Association, San Diego/Imperial chapter and the Barrio Logan College Institute.