The Advocate: Jany Martínez Ward’s journey from asylum seeker to attorney

By Matt Green

Jany Martínez was 14 when her family presented themselves at the U.S. border in Brownsville, Texas. Although they were seeking political asylum and entered the country at an official crossing, the family was detained, just as if they had sneaked in illegally. While government officials sorted out their story, Jany (pronounced HAH-nee) and her younger brother were placed in a foster home and were only allowed to talk to their parents on the phone once a day.

Originally from Cuba, Jany’s family had escaped the country when she was nine to seek a better life in Venezuela. When socialist military leader Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998, Jany’s mother observed the similarities between his regime and that of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Not long after, the family began making their way north to the United States via Mexico. Their ultimate goal was Hialeah, Florida, a northwestern suburb of Miami with a 90% majority Hispanic population known as a refuge for Cuban immigrants.

Jany’s only possessions were the clothes on her back, a doll, a stuffed animal and a small gold necklace—a treasure that could be sold to pay for travel back to Venezuela should they be turned away at the U.S. border. While she was detained, everything was taken away from her—with the exception of the necklace. She was given different clothes and slept in a room with bunks and eight other children.

Even though the family had passports and paperwork verifying their story, the children were questioned separately and treated with the assumption they would not be allowed to stay in the country. The trauma of Jany’s experiences at the border has remained with her—and has shaped her career journey to this day.

“All I remember was just being scared and terrified and people trying to make decisions over my life—whether I was allowed to stay or go—and all being spoken in a foreign language that was English,” she recalls. “And this is what prompted me to become a lawyer, to understand the laws. So, I became passionate about the law because of my story.”

In August of 1999, Hurricane Bret slammed into the Gulf Coast of Texas, unexpectedly expediting the family’s processing for asylum, and they began the 1,500-mile journey to South Florida by Greyhound. When they arrived, Jany’s mother got a job sewing mattresses, and her stepfather worked in a factory that manufactured patio tiles. Soon they were able to purchase their first car—something few people in Cuba are allowed to have. Jany recalls they kept containers of water in the trunk to fill the leaking radiator so the car wouldn’t overheat.

Jany’s mother attended college to get a teaching degree, and Jany worked on the weekends when she wasn’t in school. However, as she saw it, her real job was to get straight A’s so she could get a scholarship and achieve her dream of becoming an attorney.

While taking ESL classes in 10th grade, Jany was assigned a paper answering the question, “Write a letter to your future self explaining where you would like to be in 10 years.” In it she shared her dream of becoming an attorney, expecting to receive encouragement from her teacher, whom she idolized. The paper was returned covered in red ink, and her teacher said, “You’re never going to be a lawyer, and you’re never going to enter the University of Florida. I went there, and it’s really hard to get in.”

“I was devastated because I looked up to her as my first English teacher,” Jany notes. “I was sharing something vulnerable that, at that time, was my hope of becoming a lawyer. The person in authority in my life crushed me.”

Jany remembers crying bitterly when she heard her teacher’s words, but she also remembers the incident as pivotal in cementing her faith and dependence on God.

“That was when my faith really kicked in,” she recalls. “Not listening to the ‘no’s around me but listening to what God’s vision of my life was and what God had destined for me.”

Although Jany had been baptized as a Roman Catholic, it wasn’t until she arrived in South Florida and was invited to a Hispanic evangelical church that she accepted Christ as her Savior.

“That changed my outlook on life. And even though I didn’t believe in myself, and it was so hard, I studied the Bible, and I believed what Jesus said—that I was a daughter of God,” she explains. “That’s when I turned the ‘no’s into ‘yes’s.”

Contrary to her teacher’s expectations, Jany was accepted to the University of Florida—with a full scholarship—and she studied Spanish literature and psychology. While pre-law studies or political science may be typical undergraduate degrees for aspiring lawyers, Jany believes her degree in psychology has helped her understand the human side of practicing law.

“I’ve always been a very empathetic person, and I wanted to understand people,” she explains. “People come from different backgrounds, and as an immigrant you never really feel understood. You so desperately want to belong and want to be part of a community, but you always feel segregated and cast out.”

Of all her studies, Jany says psychology is the one field she draws from every day.

After graduating from UF, she was accepted into the Shepard Broad College of Law at Nova Southeastern University. Jany earned her JD in 2012 and was admitted to The Florida Bar in 2013, followed by admissions in Washington, D.C., Texas, New York and New Jersey.

As her second year of law school began, Jany regularly attended church with her mother and grandmother, always leaving an empty seat for the husband she was praying God would provide. On December 31st of that same year, she even wrote a letter to God with a list of qualifications she was looking for.

Then, in February, Jany was attending a law lunch where she hoped to connect with some attorneys to find out more about the profession. Across the room she saw Greg Ward and heard an audible voice say, “That’s going to be your husband.”

“I was freaked out,” she remembers, “but I was excited, so I went across the room and introduced myself.”

Initially, Jany’s enthusiasm was not well received, and Greg laughs as he recalls his first words to her were something to the effect of, “Excuse me, I’ll talk to you in a second. Let me finish talking to this guy.”

Also raised a Catholic, Greg acknowledges that at the time, he did not have a relationship with God, describing his life as a “total disaster.”

Greg had struggled after the death of his sister and father from leukemia, his marriage had ended and the law firm he started with two partners was floundering. Although he’d been casually dating other women, after his first date with Jany, he called the other girls and told them he didn’t want to see them any longer.

Early in their relationship, some people warned Greg that Jany was a “gold digger.” What they didn’t realize was that he was the one who was in trouble, not her. He had lost multiple businesses and had been financially ruined by a messy divorce.

“She met me at my lowest point,” he recalls. “I was drinking, sleeping on a couch. I had a Kmart indoor-outdoor table in my dining room . . . I was in free fall.”

Sensing there was something different about Jany, Greg began begging her to take him to church with her. She waited five months before doing so, gauging the seriousness of the relationship. When she finally brought him, he recalls having a powerful encounter with God as the English-speaking pastor at the Hispanic church preached.

“I felt the Holy Spirit when I walked in the door, I started crying,” Greg explains, still getting emotional to this day. “I had some credentials at that point. I had a lot of success, and I graduated top of my law school class. But I just didn’t have traction in life. I had no real power, and I kept failing and failing and failing—it was so hard.”

When the altar call was given, he heard an audible voice commanding him to go, and he ran to the altar.

“I was the only one there that day that received Jesus, and it changed my life,” Greg says. “If it wasn’t for Jany, I’m sure the Holy Spirit would have got me eventually, but I was in a bad spot.”

Greg and Jany were married in 2012. While Greg continued work with high-end clients, doing contract litigation, Jany pursued her dream of setting up a personal injury practice, running radio ads for her legal services in Spanish.

From the time she started law school, Jany had decided she wanted to fight for the rights of immigrants. Due to language barriers, unfamiliarity with U.S. law and experiences with law enforcement and courts in their countries of origin, immigrants are vulnerable to exploitation and neglect.

“We have kids that are 18 and 19 years old, starting college and they get in major accidents,” she explains. “Because their parents are Hispanic, they never knew they even had rights. They pile up medical bills, or they suffer in their grades because they’re injured and it affects their lives.”

Greg recalls saying at the time, “All right, you can go do your little practice. I’ll keep doing my big important stuff.”

It turns out, however, that her first case was a big one—big enough to cause Greg to quit his work in commercial litigation and launch the Ward Law Group with Jany. Jany describes the early days of the firm in unglamorous terms.

“It was he and I on a plastic foldable table, my law school laptop and my cell phone,” she says, smiling. “We did everything from beginning to end. He would go to trial. He would win the cases. I was the receptionist, the legal assistant, the person to visit the client, sign up the client. I was the negotiator on the phone.”

Greg attributes Jany’s immediate success to her authenticity and compassion—a quality that people were able to hear in her radio ads. He notes that many people go to law school with intentions of helping people, but become hardened by the profession.

“The miracle isn’t that she was able to get into law school,” he explains. “The miracle is she was able to get through law school without becoming a lawyer.”

Fifteen years later, the Ward Law Group has 200 employees and offices in Miami, Orlando and New York. Since its founding, the firm has recovered $500 million for clients. Although most of Ward Law Group’s attorneys are Spanish-speakers, they come from upper middle-class families and are often third-generation immigrants.

As they care for their clients, the Wards remind the team of the struggles of their parents and grandparents, who often arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs and a limited understanding of the rights to which they were entitled.

“Particularly, it’s my job to enforce the standards on attorneys who sometimes want to do their job as an attorney,” Greg explains, “but they don’t always think of the client as a human being.”

Jany’s role is more front-facing. She appears in the firm’s ads, meets with clients, listens to their stories, explains their rights and makes sure they are heard. She thrives on personal connections with clients.

“That connection with clients, hearing their stories, advocating for them—that’s what I love,” she notes. “Even though I have 200 employees, and they do a lot of the law, if a client wants to talk to me directly, I make the time to be with them and to meet with them because at the end of the day, that’s what I love. That’s the vision of the firm.”

The couple see the firm as a means to live out their faith.

“We put it out there that we’re Christian lawyers and that our main core values are serving clients, serving each other as a team, serving the community and having faith,” Greg says, explaining that the couple expects those values to be exhibited by everyone in the firm, not just themselves.

The growth of Ward Law Group has enabled the couple, now the parents of twin girls, to give generously to causes close to their hearts. Firm advocates of tithing to their church, the Wards have also financially invested in churches, schools and orphanages in Latin America. They both serve on the board of “I Have a Dream” Foundation in Miami, which supports the educational achievements of low-income children from kindergarten through college. The couple has raised half a million dollars for research into leukemia—the disease that claimed the lives of Greg’s father and sister.

In addition to their charitable work, the Wards help guide entrepreneurs who are just starting out with skills in scaling their businesses. They’ve launched a co-working space where business owners can turn their ideas into sustainable companies.

“They rent offices month-to-month,” Jany explains, “but we also equip them with information so that once they get big enough, they can move out of our little offices.”

Jany’s long-term dream, however, is one that completes the full circle of her family’s harrowing experience: to start a nonprofit foundation to help displaced immigrants—whether they be from Latin America, South Asia or the Middle East.

“Displaced immigrants could be anybody displaced from their own country—whether it is for political reasons or otherwise,” she explains. “I want to be able to give them the empowerment, tools, knowledge or information to be able to help them assimilate in a new country.”

Matt Green is the editorial director for AVAIL Journal. He also serves as vice president of marketing for Pioneers, a global church-planting organization based in Orlando, Florida. He lives in Central Florida with his wife, Andy. They have four children and one grandchild.