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iwildcasino As the latest Florida Bar president, this Coral Gables lawyer champions mental health
For four years in the 1980s, Roland Sanchez-Medina Jr. studied hard at the University of Miami. His Cuban immigrant family didn’t have generational wealth, so he felt the pressure of making his college experience matter, graduating with a degree in finance and quickly finding work as a credit analyst at a bank.
But when he considered what it would look like to have a career he actually loved, he thought back to his time in civics class at his Miami high school, Belen Jesuit Preparatory.
“I want to do something positive every day,” he told the Miami Herald.
Sanchez-Medina took a risk and pivoted, going to law school and starting a new career as an attorney. This summer, the Coral Gables-based lawyer was named president of the Florida Bar Association.
In Florida, any attorney wanting to practice law has to be a member of the Florida Bar, and Sanchez-Medina aims to hold every one of the more than 112,000 members to a high standard. But in addition to enforcing discipline for indiscretions, he also wants members dealing with mental health stressors to feel supported.
In his new role, one of his top priorities is making sure the state’s lawyers are of good mental health. The well-being of lawyers can be overlooked, he said, and he wants to change that. A 2023 study published in the Healthcare journal cited research showing that in a sample of 13,000 lawyers, 28% experienced depression, 21% had alcohol abuse problems and 11% abused drugs.
“We need to talk about it at some level,” Sanchez-Medina said. “It’s something that gets swept under the rug because clients don’t want their attorneys to have mental health or substance abuse issues.”
Sanchez-Medina was born in Havana in 1966. His father was an orthopedic surgeon and moved their family from Cuba for a job opening in the Republic of Congo. After living there for two years, the family found political asylum in South Africa and moved to Spain shortly thereafter. Sanchez-Medina was 9 when his family moved to Miami.
“What I find to be amazing is how my parents had two young kids and left their country of being established,” he said. “It’s the immigrant story you see so much in South Florida. This country was giving my parents the opportunity to succeed.”
While his family’s beginnings were humble, his father earned enough money working as a surgeon to send him to Belen. It was there that Sanchez-Medina became interested in civics and and the justice system.
After the University of Miami and his short stint at the bank, he attended law school at New York University and began his legal career in 1992.
Sanchez-Medina said he always wanted to do more than simply work in an office all day and bill hours to his clients with a focus on making money. The need to give back led him to joining the Cuban American Bar Association in 2001 as a board member, and in 2009, he was elected as the organization’s president.
“I just enjoyed my Cuban American Bar Association experience so much through the friendships I made, the differences you can see in assisting attorneys,” he said.
Being of service to other lawyers and building relationships helped Sanchez-Medina find his purpose in an industry that he said can often be stressful and thankless.
Considering the stresses of working in law, Sanchez-Mendez is focused on improving the lifestyles of Florida Bar members. Members of the Florida Bar are recommended to pursue counseling with Florida Lawyers Assistance and, depending on the situation, are sometimes mandated to obtain counseling.
Outside of a demanding career in law, Sanchez-Medina and his wife, fellow lawyer Johanna Armengol, 57, are the parents to Mariana, a 26-year-old Harvard graduate, Alessandra, a graduate of Vanderbilt University, and Christian, a 17-year-old high school senior.
Ultimately, Sanchez-Medina sees his biggest responsibility as a lawyer as representing Americans of Cuban descent.
“I want other Cuban Americans to know that it’s attainable,” he said. “I want to make sure I’m making the Cuban-American community proud. The reason I work hard at it is because I want people to say when he leaves the Bar, it’s better than when he came in. It’s important for me to not do a decent job, but a fantastic job.”
This story was originally published September 29iwildcasino, 2024, 6:00 AM.