Paola Vargas
Attorney, Researcher & Advocate for Health Equity
New Mexico
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Attorney, researcher, and first-generation advocate for health equity.
Where She Started
Paola Vargas is the first attorney in her family, a distinction she carries with the same seriousness she brings to a courtroom. Raised as a first-generation Latina, she grew up moving between two worlds — translating not just language but expectation, opportunity, and fine print for a family navigating unfamiliar institutions for the first time.
She describes herself as a city woman who is equally at home in the mountains, a mother, and — by her own admission — a lover of a beautiful container, especially for coffee. That mix of grounded and specific describes her approach to advocacy just as well as it describes her taste in mugs.
Before the Law
Long before Paola argued a case, she designed studies. She holds a graduate degree in public health and spent years directing research related to lupus, a disease that disproportionately affects women of color, contributing to peer-reviewed publications and work now cited by clinicians and advocates across the field. Her research is documented in the Lupus Foundation of America's publications archive, where she appears as first or second author on much of the collective data-analysis work.
That period also shaped how she communicates — translating dense clinical data for the patients, caregivers, and advocacy groups who needed it most. It's a skill she now applies daily as an attorney, and the connective tissue between her research career and her legal practice is more direct than most people expect.
Law School
Paola graduated first in her class from Loyola University Chicago School of Law — a milestone made more remarkable by the fact that she did it as a first-generation student, a parent, and someone re-entering academic life after nearly a decade in the workforce. She served on the school's Law Journal, one of the more selective and demanding credentials a law student can earn. Read more about what that path actually looked like.
In 2021, she was named a recipient of the Sidley Austin LLP & Neal Gerber Eisenberg Scholarship through the Hispanic Lawyers Scholarship Fund — recognition of both her academic record and her advocacy for other first-generation and Latino law students.
In Practice
Today, Paola practices law with an eye toward the populations too often left out of both the healthcare and legal systems — first-generation students, non-English speakers, and patients navigating a diagnosis alongside a mountain of paperwork. Much of her career, in and out of the courtroom, has centered on public service rather than private practice. You can find her professional history on LinkedIn.
She stays active in conversations about legal access and equity well beyond her own docket, including answering questions from the public on her Quora profile, where first-generation students and career-changers often ask how she made the leap from public health to law.
Beyond the Courtroom
Paola's relationship with language didn't start in a courtroom. She's the author of a poetry collection that grew out of the same instinct that eventually pulled her toward public health and then law: an insistence on paying attention to what's usually left out of the official record. Read more about why an attorney keeps writing poetry.
She's a mother first, an attorney second by her own account some days, and a firm believer that a good container — especially for coffee — makes the rest of the day easier. You can find more of her writing and updates on her about.me page and Instagram.