Irene Oria, incoming president of the Hispanic National Bar Association

In late September, Miami-based FisherBroyles partner Irene Oria was sworn in as the incoming president of the Hispanic National Bar Association. Oria first joined the Hispanic Bar in law school in the 1990s and served as the organization's Florida president in 2015. She is a commercial litigator who has recently focused her practice on class-action defense in the financial services and insurance sector.

The Daily Business Review spoke with her about her upcoming priorities, which include working to ensure the 2020 United States election is secure and educating and discussing the controversial Helms-Burton litigation making its way through the courts.

The conversation has been edited lightly for clarity.

Let's start this conversation broadly: What are your biggest priorities coming into the presidency?

Obviously, I'm going to be president in 2020, which is a consequential election year. And so I will have robust nonpartisan 2020 election initiatives to deploy our HNBA members knowledge and skills, including our Spanish-speaking skills, to ensure the integrity and security of the upcoming election — basically doing anything we can do as lawyers, from poll-working to poll-closing operations to legal phone banks to voter registration drives to voter protection efforts.

It's also important to me, especially in a year like this, that we bring our community together and that we're representing everybody in our community. I've noticed we've had a lot of programming directed to law firm attorneys — medium-sized and big law — as well as our corporate in-house attorneys, and not as many initiatives directed to our solo/small firm attorneys, government attorneys and nonprofit attorneys. It is important to me in a year like this to have programming and new initiatives that are targeted to help them because they represent over 75% of the Latino attorneys in the U.S. We need to engage them more than we are, and we need to make sure we're giving them the training they need to advance their careers. The government and public interest attorneys are at the frontline, battling the legal issues that are so important to our community.

In your inaugural speech, you said: "All of us — Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Guatemalans, Dominicans, Hondurans, and on and on — we've all been victims of disparagement and stereotypes lodged by non-Latinos and Latinos alike, based on our particular country conditions and life circumstances. All of that needs to stop." What sort of in-fighting were you referencing? And why highlight this divide in particular?

I think it's important to bring our community together. I think you can just turn on the TV and hear divisive comments about our community. Usually, it's coming from non-Latinos or non-Hispanics. But there have been times when we attack each other, and we can't do that. We have to come together as a community in order to fight our common enemies. As far as diversity and inclusion, which is obviously what HNBA is focused on, we have to come together in order for us to have a way to represent everybody in our community regardless of what country they come from, what school they went to or what city they live in.

Speaking of diversity, how would you characterize the inroads Hispanics have made into the law?

We've certainly made some inroads, but we have a long way to go. In many ways, we're still behind other minority groups. For example, in the corporate sector, as far as Fortune 500 or Fortune 100 GCs, there are fewer Hispanics in those roles than Black or Asian Americans. We have had times where we've been doing better. In recent years we've declined again. So we have to do better.

In law firms, we're doing a little better than we were before but we're still underrepresented, especially in Big Law, and especially Latinas. So there's so much work to be done. In government and public interest law, we do have a lot of attorneys but as I said, we have to be more vigilant and make sure we support our attorneys going into those sectors.

I'm sure you've noticed the recent flurry of movement regarding Helms-Burton. What do you think of the litigation and law?

That litigation gets back to very complex issues that we foresee will be the subject of litigation for many years to come. It's relatively new, given that this the first time the Act has been allowed to take effect since its 1996 passage. There's a lack of precedent and the courts will have to interpret the Act and the exemptions to the Act and how this may impact foreign companies doing business in Cuba.

The issues being litigated are obviously very sensitive and complicated and involve private litigants, thus the HNBA has not taken an official position on the interpretation or the implementation of the Act.

What we do is we focus on providing education and discussion. An example of that was we had a plenary at a Miami conference in 2017. We had a plenary on the future of U.S.-Cuba relations,  which included discussion of the Helms-Burton Act. And we've had similar events in different regions, including Miami in the last couple of years.

We also had a Cuba task force, which is now called the Special Committee on Cuba. Among other things, the committee addresses diplomatic and humanitarian concerns, analyzing the repercussions of the Helms-Burton Act. So we certainly look at these issues but we do not take an official position on litigation, pending litigation or on the legislation itself.

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