Marisol Vega

Marisol's story

Marisol grew up in Pilsen, the eldest of four, in a household that doubled as an informal advice centre for the neighbourhood. Her mother, a seamstress, translated for relatives at the courthouse, and Marisol often went along. She remembers watching a judge decide where a cousin's children would live and thinking that the family had not understood a word of it.

She was the first in her family to go to university, studying social work at UIC before switching course and attending DePaul College of Law. She clerked for a domestic-relations judge in Cook County and then spent five years at Legal Aid Chicago representing parents who could not afford a lawyer.

The case she carries with her is a 2013 custody matter in which a father with a brain injury was about to lose contact with his daughters because nobody had explained his options. Marisol secured a supervised-visitation arrangement that grew into shared parenting, and the eldest daughter wrote to her from college last year. She joined Hale & Mercer in 2014 to build a family practice that treats every client that way.

Marisol lives in Bridgeport with her husband Luis, a firefighter, and their twin sons. She is a volunteer mediator with the Center for Conflict Resolution and teaches a family-law clinic at DePaul in the spring.