“I was familiar with the concept of immigration because my father brought a lot of family members here and helped friends apply for visas,” she said. Elizabeth, or “Liz,” was the first of three daughters, and the family spent four months a year in Quito until she was 12. While home on leave, he married his wife, Cecelia, in Quito and they moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland.
“a whole other full-time job,” as she puts it.īut then, Stern has become adroit at juggling not only jobs, but also cultures and family roles.Ĭesar Arturo Espín, Stern’s father, was an Ecuadorian diplomat with the Organization for American States. In addition to leading the firm’s global mobility and immigration group, she was recently named office managing partner in Washington, D.C. Hailed as a trailblazer and the recipient of many honors, she is recognized today as one of the foremost authorities in helping multinational companies position their corporate and professional employees where they’re most needed while complying with the immigration regulations of any number of countries.Īfter Shaw Pittman, she spent nine years at Baker McKenzie, where she helped lead the development of an integrated global mobility and migration service, and joined Mayer Brown in 2014. Stern remained for 19 years at Shaw Pittman, where she started the business immigration practice and launched one of the earliest versions of an online immigration case management and tracking solution for clients. It didn’t hurt that many of the entrepreneurs were also young. She gained exposure to tech CEOs and “innovative tech types” while she was still an associate. Suddenly, this young associate had to advise all these clients on the new laws.”
“The timing led to many more significant opportunities for me.
“Immigration was very much in the spotlight, the tech sector was burgeoning in the D.C. and, for the first time, imposed sanctions on employers who hired ineligible workers. It included amnesty for undocumented individuals based on their tenure in the U.S. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act had passed the same year she joined Shaw Pittman. I’m not even sure I knew it was an area of practice at the time.” “I fell into it because of my international background. “Immigration was something I had dabbled in,” said Stern, the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants and now office managing partner of Mayer Brown in Washington, D.C. It was the mid-1980s, a time when the tech sector around the nation’s capital was just starting to catch fire, and those fast-growing firms needed talent from abroad. Her first job out of the University of Virginia School of Law was as an associate with Shaw Pittman in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth Espín Stern ’86 (Col ’83) was in the proverbial right place at the right time to launch a career in immigration law.
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