As an attorney and tech company founder, Josephine’s story is both familiar to many New Yorkers and unique to the legal profession.
Born and raised in New York City to immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic, Josephine learned at an early age what it takes to dream and take risks, as her parents did when coming to America, while summer trips to the DR reminded her of why so many New Yorkers have made a similar journey in pursuit of a better life.
But with her parents in and out of her life, she also learned the importance of community and that it truly “takes a village” to nurture one’s dreams and aspirations, whether that village is in Washington Heights and Sunset Park—where she grew up largely under the care of a non-relative “godmother”—or as is increasingly the case, the global digital village that we all now live in.
Like many personal journeys, Josephine’s included a lightbulb moment that illuminated everything she wanted to achieve. Determined to pay her way through college while working at a law firm, she started doing tech work on the side, building a website for a local company and testing software the law firm was developing.
Long before she became a lawyer, Josephine already knew the potential of law to change lives due to her father having a bad experience with a personal injury attorney that negatively impacts him to this day. And although she also saw the transformative potential of tech for the firm where she worked, what frustrated her was they used it just to improve their bottom line—and not to improve the client experience.
It was then she realized that technology, in combination with the law, was the key to her professional ambition to empower and give back to her community, turning clients into family members and worry into hope for those going through stressful and unthinkable situations.
After earning her undergraduate degree, Josephine went on to attend Pace University Law School and earn her Environmental Law Certification. As she was finishing law school, Josephine also started to learn more about website development and database architecture. Her tech skills grew alongside her growing awareness of the many injuries that result from exposure to toxic materials and substances.
This led to a second “aha” moment: our world is changing. Our lives are more interconnected than ever before, and attorneys need to be ready for every fight, whether it’s car accidents or industrial emissions. And that fight will increasingly rely on building tech tools that reflect our changing world.
The daughter of immigrants determined to start her own law firm, Josephine was following a familiar script of overcoming adversity to achieve success and give back to the community that supported and nurtured her. But she flipped the script, and began writing her own, by understanding the role that technology will play in the modern firm.
Her life lessons led Josephine to found PainInjuryLaw.com, the digital home of Pena Persaud Law PLLC, with a goal to redefine the personal injury legal industry using cutting-edge technology to provide transparent, efficient, and accessible legal services, championing justice for injured individuals while empowering them with control and significantly reducing costs.
Josephine’s founding mission is to challenge the status quo and prove that superior legal outcomes can not only coexist with transparency and client-first principles, but grow directly out of them.
The many victories Josephine has achieved so far as a lawyer have focused on using the law as a tool to help clients and maximize every avenue of compensation for them, whether they’ve been hurt in a rear-end crash, lost a loved one to a construction accident, or needed workers’ compensation benefits just to get by.
That focus hasn’t changed but has been enhanced by her vision of combining old school legal tactics and new school tech tools that blur the lines between law firm and tech firm but ultimately serve a single, clear purpose: use the power of law—and the power of technology—to transform lives for the better.