Mariel Mercado-Guevara discovers a new career that fulfils her desire to help the Hispanic community
'My late father's experience showed me how education can empower communities to be a part of the political process.'– Mariel Mercado-Guevara
Pursuing a law career was something Mariel Mercado-Guevara was always interested in, even if it wasn’t her first career choice. That was opera.
As a professional opera singer, Mercado-Guevara performed mezzo-soprano roles at theaters around the country, including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. “Expressing myself every night in front of a live audience was a natural high, my favorite thing about performing,” she says.
Mercado-Guevara’s first career laid the ground work for her latest pursuit – studying issues of intellectual property as a student at Rutgers School of Law-Newark.
Her exposure to the field came while studying music at Boston University, where as a recording engineer, she encountered some of the issues she would later come across working at a boutique intellectual property law firm and in law school.
Mercado-Guevara also found inspiration in the example set by her father, Juan F. Mercado Jimenez, who, after retiring as an Army Sergeant First Class during the 1990s, became a Hispanic consumer adviser to Maryland Governor William Donald Schaeffer.
“My late father’s experience showed me how education can empower communities to be a part of the political process,” she says.
Mercado-Guevara began to envision that through the law she could follow her father’s footsteps as an advocate for the Hispanic community.
In 2008, married and the mother of a young son (she now has two sons), she decided to take a job at a law firm before committing to law school. By then, she had a professional opera career behind her, had worked as a realtor, and as Barack Obama’s New Jersey Hispanic campaign coordinator. She began working as a legal secretary at Kenyon & Kenyon LLP in New York City, which specializes in intellectual property – and she loved it.
She spent three more years with the firm after beginning Rutgers School of Law-Newark, attending classes at night. Last summer she enrolled in the Rutgers Community and Transactional Lawyering Clinic, where she worked with trademark and copyright clients, startup businesses and on a guardianship case.
Given her intellectual property experiences and interests, Mercado-Guevara was urged by her professors to apply for the Hispanic National Bar Association/Microsoft Intellectual Property Law Institute. She was selected as one of 25 law students nationwide to receive a scholarship to participate in the immersion program, which she attended in Washington, D.C. last month.
One of the highlights of the program was a day at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The students were briefed on a case involving an electronic medical records patent and then heard oral arguments. A poor and underprepared argument by a junior attorney made Mercado-Guevara realize that the attorney “could be any one of us fresh out of law school. It was very humbling and made me want to work harder to ensure that does not happen to me.”
In a private seminar, Judge Jimmie V. Reyna, the first Mexican-American appointed judge on the federal circuit court of appeals, offered students interested in helping the Hispanic community the following advice: “Finish school, pass the bar, and become the best lawyer you can be. When you pass the bar, you are granted a ticket, a ticket that comes with power.”
This summer Mercado-Guevara is continuing her education through a judicial internship with the Hon. Lourdes I. Santiago, Class of ’81, of the Superior Court, Hudson County.
She has also found a way to combine her passion for music with a legal career. In May, she sang the national anthem at the Hispanic Bar Association-NJ Gala at MetLife Stadium. “My instrument is always with me,” she says. “It is therapeutic for me, like meditation, to sing.”