We have spoken with so many recovering lawyers on this show, but I don't know that we have ever spoken with someone who is still in it.

It's why when I connected with Melissa Gomez-Nelson, I knew we needed to hear her story of

plowing through college and law school, becoming partner at a big law firm, and choosing to go

in-house at Booz Allen Hamilton, a management and technology consulting firm. We're going to talk

about the big picture, but also about how a girl from the Rio Grande Valley learns the

cultural nuance of legal life. Melissa, thank you for doing this.

Thank you for having me, Alicia.

I want to start with you growing up as a border kid.

Yeah.

Tell me about some of those experiences as a child that led you to want to become a lawyer.

My family, we were migrant farm workers. My dad was a labor contractor. And in the sixth grade,

we started migrating to Indiana to work in the fields. And so my father would draft these contracts with the farmers for his own payment and also for

the payment of the workers. And he was obviously bound by local labor laws. And he did his best to

understand that and make sure he was following it. He also did his best to make sure that he was

compensating all of his workers very fairly. That was very important to him. But he was often selling

himself short because he just wasn't equipped with the tools that he needed. He wasn't a lawyer.

And not only was he not a lawyer, there was no one else in our

family who was a lawyer. I'm the first in my family to graduate from college. And to this day,

I'm the only lawyer in my family, either on my mom's side or my dad's side. So even extended family.

So for me, I knew that knowledge was power. I knew that if I became a lawyer,

I could help protect my family. So you go to St. Mary's and San Antonio was the idea to push through

in two years? Yes. And it actually started before that. So I graduated high school in three years. I did dual

...