Maria Laura Sigaud Hernandez

I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and immigrated to the U.S. at an early age with my parents, both from a small town on the border of Paraguay and Argentina. I am fluent in Spanish and enjoy travelling to South America to visit my family. 

As an undergraduate of Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi, I studied English literature and found out I had a knack for research and writing.   I decided to apply those skills to the study of law and in 1999 I moved to Houston to attend law school at South Texas College of Law.  For the next three years, I studied full-time and clerked for a civil litigation firm handling cases in multiple areas of the law such as labor/employment, personal injury, and toxic torts.  I first became exposed to Social Security disability cases there. In 2003, I began my career as a Social Security disability lawyer. Initially, I thought I would eventually move on to immigration law, given my background as an immigrant. But I quickly found out that helping people with disabilities was not only  rewarding on a professional level, but on a personal one as well.