Jan 9: About My Mentor

One of my mentors for this internship is Maria Severson (right). She’s the daughter of an immigrant, and neither of her parents got more than a high school education. However, through the support of her parents, she became the first woman in her family to attend college, an accomplishment that she completely paid for herself. She attended Iona college, where she got a business degree, and went on to sell ad space in magazines in New York.

Later in life, she moved to the west coast to get an advanced degree studying law at the California Western School Of Law. Although she went into her courses with the intention to move back to the world of advertising, she found that she had a passion for law and decided to pursue it as a full-time career. She started her career as a civil litigator, and then worked for the city of San Diego as a city attorney. Later, she became a prosecutor, then a civil trial lawyer, and stayed there for eight years until 2008, when she opened Aguirre and Severson LLP with her partner Michael Aguirre.

Her goal, and indeed, the goal of the firm, is to use the power of law to serve the public interest; taking on cases for the greater good.She aims to help the San Diego community through helping victimized individuals or organizations push back against larger institutions that have wronged them.

In addition to today’s prompt, I feel as though I should talk about a part of my job that’s unique- confidentiality. Certain aspects of a lawyers job are protected under the attorney work product (link). Because of this, I can’t discuss any of AMS Lawyers opinions on clients or rulings. For example, if we took a case on a man that wants to sue his neighbor because her dog kept attacking him, I legally could not say if we thought the man was making things up, or if the case wasn’t worth the effort. However, I could state the facts of the case, something along the lines of “we are helping Joe Ronson sue his neighbor Suzanne Forester for repeated attacks from her dog”. This law is in place to let the lawyers thoughts and expressions of some thoughts remain private. I wanted to bring this up because this blog is public, and there may be some prompts that I am unable to fully answer due to that confidentiality agreement.