Evelyn M. Rodriguez already had garnered years of experience as a corporate lawyer when she left her native Venezuela for Miami and began an LL.M. degree at the University of Miami School of Law.
The advanced specialized law program exposed Rodriguez to the eccentricities of the United States’ legal system, introduced her to the courtroom arena and sharpened the litigation skills that have buoyed her career as a family law specialist.
After earning her degree, Rodriguez moved to California where she has practiced for more than two decades in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley area, managing marital dissolutions and custody disputes for a client base of tech entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, founders, business owners, professionals, physicians, investors and international families.
“My degree at UM helped me discover my passion for litigation—it’s where I found that I belong in a courtroom, not a boardroom,” said Rodriguez, who thrived on the mock trial rehearsals and experience the program provided. “My learning experience gave me the confidence to reinvent my career and explore different areas of practice.”
In Venezuela, and before dedicating her career exclusively to family law, Rodriguez spent a decade serving as international corporate counsel for businesses operating throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America.
Her corporate background has granted her an exceptional advantage in high-asset divorce matters, particularly valuable in the Bay Area, where the number of “gray divorce” cases, involving couples 50 and older who divorce after decades of marriage, is on the rise, as it is across the country.
This segment of the population represents a larger portion of divorces in the U.S. these days, and these cases pose their own unique dynamics.
“When you are younger, you’re more concerned about custody issues. These tend to be the more emotional part of the case. But when you’re at a point in life where you’ve accumulated more assets, where you thought you were set but now find yourself dividing property and your retirement, and when you have less life ahead of you to rebuild financially, the dynamics, then the ways you approach the case, are different,” she explained.
As a mother raising her own family in Silicon Valley, Rodriguez brings both courtroom strength and profound human understanding to complex child custody disputes. And her prior experience in corporate law honed problem-solving skills that have been invaluable to her legal specialty.
“That’s how I see myself in family law as well. I became really good at identifying the problem and identifying the steps needed to resolve it,” Rodriguez said. “And being familiar with all those different complex issues on compensation or reviewing taxes, being able to read a profit and loss statement, all that feeds well into family law.
“But the most important understanding is that you are there to help the clients to navigate and solve, and not to become part of the conflict. There’s a big difference between aggressive and effective representation, and it’s very easy as a family law attorney to get caught up in the party’s conflict and add fuel to it,” she added.
Advice for young attorney entering the field these days?
“Keep in mind that the career you start with might not be the career you end up with later in life, so keep an open mind and be flexible to walk that crooked path that may take you wonderful places,” Rodriguez suggested. “That’s one thing a law career affords us.”
“It’s also important to practice work-life balance. When you’re young and don’t have a family, it’s easier to work the crazy hours, and that’s probably the time to do it. But remember that your clients’ problems are not your problems,” Rodriguez advised.
“You care deeply, and you’re helping your clients going through whatever they’re going through, but don’t take their issues personally. Burnout is real, and we see it in family law very often where you see these attorneys and you don’t know who’s divorcing—the client or the attorney,” she added.
