Meet Rudy Hernandez Camacho

Rudy Hernandez did things a little backwards from the traditional college experience: He was a student in law school before he was involved in campus life.

Overseeing 23 events in a single year as President of La Voz — the Latino Law Student Association at the William S. Boyd School of Law — was quite a change from his undergraduate days at the University of Nevada, Reno.

The number of events he even attended there, was closer to zero.

“I was really uninvolved in school, any programs or groups, just because I worked so much,” Hernandez says of working construction with his dad, driving crane and conveyor trucks to deliver roofing materials.

Serving as La Voz President during his final year of law school extended a series of firsts for the Reno native. He was the first in his family to go beyond high school. Law school was the first time he lived anywhere other than Reno and the first time he wasn’t balancing classes with a job to keep him from exploring student life and activities.

“None of my friends went to college or did anything like that,” he says. “Law school was the first time I was around people who looked like me or had similar backgrounds in an academic setting.”

La Voz is best known for the Huellas (“footprints”) mentoring program for non-traditional law students. It connects practicing attorneys and judges to Boyd Law students, undergraduates and high school students. Some now-practicing attorneys actually started with the group in high school.

“They did a lot for me,” Hernandez says. “I started to have this sense of giving back. I’m like a big believer in mentorship and the idea of pulling as you climb. I saw everything that La Voz had done for me, so I wanted to do that for other students.”

Hernandez moved up to the board of La Voz in his 2L year, lobbying to expand the group’s presence in Reno. “There was really no representation of Boyd up there. Most people (at UNR) end up going to law school in northern California or other places,” he says. “I really pushed for the leap, and we took it.”

The numbers show that it worked. In the 2022-23 academic year, La Voz had 45 participants in Reno and 120 in Las Vegas. In this just-concluded year, it grew to 80 participants in Reno and 175 in Las Vegas.

Hernandez took the bar exam in July and now works full-time with Claggett & Sykes, the Las Vegas firm where he clerked. The firm specializes in catastrophic injury cases set for trial — an example of the doors La Voz can open.

“From firsthand experience, I can tell you a lot of Hispanic and minority students are pigeonholed into thinking, ‘I want to do immigration or I want to do criminal defense’,” Hernandez says. “But there are other ways to help the Latino community.”

From the contracts involved in small-business ownership to representation in personal injury cases, “You don’t realize how much is out there until you start to get involved.”