Orlando Ortega-Medina

Orlando Ortega-Medina (born in Los Angeles, California) is a North American attorney licensed in the state of California and a writer of literary fiction. He is a national of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He has worked in the judicial research pool for the Planning and Research Unit of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, served as a panel attorney for the California Appellate Project, and has directed the operations of several U.S. immigration and consular practices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto and Quebec. He is the Managing Director of a U.S. corporate immigration practice in London, England. He has authored fifty short stories, some of which have been featured in UCLA's Westwind Journal of the Arts, and one of which won the National Society of Arts and Letters award for Short Stories. Ortega-Medina’s collection Jerusalem Ablaze: Stories of Love and Other Obsessions (Cloud Lodge Books ) was published in the United Kingdom and Ireland in February 2017 and is scheduled for release in North America in Fall 2017.

Early Life and Family

Ortega-Medina's parents emigrated from Cuba to the United States on the eve of the Cuban Revolution and settled in Los Angeles where Ortega-Medina was born. He grew up in Fullerton, California and attended schools in Whittier and La Habra, California.

Following graduation from High School, Ortega-Medina spent a gap year living in Israel, working in the groves of Kfar Bilu and in the fields of Moshav Lakhish, Israel. His experiences during this key formative period inspire the themes of several of his works of fiction. Upon his return to California, he joined forces with a lyricist to form the folk-rock group The Stand, which featured songs written by the duo. Following the breakup of The Stand, Ortega-Medina applied for admission to UCLA, where he was awarded a scholarship. He graduated cum laude in 1988, earning a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, with a concentration in Creative Writing.

After graduating from UCLA, Ortega-Medina enrolled in Southwestern University School of Law, received his law degree (J.D.) in 1991, and in 1992 was admitted to the roll of lawyers in California.

Legal career

Prior to his admission to the State Bar of California, Ortega-Medina worked as an in-house law clerk at Southern California Edison, where he gained experience in a broad range of practice areas, including labour law, securities, real estate and litigation. He subsequently worked as a judicial research clerk at the Planning and Research Unit of the Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Following his admission to the bar in 1992, Ortega-Medina practiced criminal defence under the tutelage of Attorney Kenneth Kahn, of The Falcon and the Snowman fame. He then established his own criminal defence firm in Santa Ana, California modelled after Kahn’s practice. In his practice, Ortega-Medina handled the defence of virtually every kind of case, including white-collar offences, narcotics trafficking, hard-core gang crimes, and murders.

After four years, Ortega-Medina moved his practice to San Francisco in 1997, where he transitioned to representing clients in appeals, post-conviction relief, and deportation defence. During this period, he also commenced representation of off-shore artists and musicians before the US Immigration Service.

In 1998, he was invited to join the attorney panel of the California Appellate Project, where he represented indigent defendants in death penalty cases before the California Appellate Court for two years. That same year, he was invited by human-rights attorney Robert E. Lazo to join the Employment Lawyers’ Group (“ELG”). His association with ELG continued until the untimely death of Robert Lazo in 2004.

In August 1999, Ortega-Medina and his life partner expatriated to Canada. He continued to remotely operate his San Francisco law practice from his base in Toronto, which by then was primarily internet based. Shortly after his arrival in Toronto, he was recruited to set up a U.S. business immigration and visa department in the offices of a prominent Canadian immigration firm. In 2001, he was subsequently recruited by a business immigration consulting firm in Quebec to lobby the US Department of Labor in Boston on behalf of Canadian construction workers seeking to work in the Northeast of the United States.

In 2003, Ortega-Medina returned to San Francisco where he founded Ortega-Medina & Associates, a US business immigration firm that assists companies and high net worth individuals acquire and expand businesses in the United States and that advises on the sourcing of visas for executive-level employees transferring from foreign companies to affiliated offices in United States.

In 2005, due to increasing demand from the firm’s European clients, Ortega-Medina launched a European Gateway office of Ortega-Medina & Associates in London, United Kingdom to provide advice and representation to corporations and high net worth investors in consular and visa matters. His firm has recently gained a reputation in the motion picture and film industry as one of the go-to law firms in London for sourcing cast and crew visas for production companies seeking to shoot in the United States.

Ortega-Medina has been recently featured in The Atlantic discussing the O-1B visa category, and in March 2017 was interviewed on the Al Jazeera Media Network regarding the Trump Administration’s immigration-related Executive Orders.

Writing career

Whilst at UCLA, Ortega-Medina studied creative writing under professor Carolyn See, The New Yorker’s fiction editor Daniel Menaker, and Professor Emeritus Gerald Jay Goldberg. During this period, he was quite prolific, producing nearly 50 short stories, two screenplays, and four novel treatments. He associated with a salon of young writers that regularly shared work at the English Department’s open readings. Some of his short stories were featured in UCLA’s Westwind Journal of the Arts, and his story “Torture by Roses”, an homage to Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, won the National Society of Arts and Letters award for Short Stories.

In 2016, Ortega-Medina completed work on Jerusalem Ablaze: Stories of Love and Other Obsessions, a collection that updates a number of his earlier works, and introduces some of his newer material. Cloud Lodge Books acquired the collection and published it in the United Kingdom and Ireland in February 2017. The collection is scheduled for publication in North America in Fall 2017.

Additionally, Ortega-Medina has appeared in written publications discussing complex business immigration and EU-USA specific issues. His articles have appeared in International HR Advisor, Human Resource Professional, National Journal of Human Resources Management, The Canadian HR Reporter, Construction Professional Magazine, HG.org, and on BritishExpats.com.

Personal life

Ortega-Medina is openly gay and is a strong supporter of LGBT+ rights. In 2005, taking advantage of Canada’s recognition of same-sex marriage, Ortega-Medina and his life partner were among the first same-sex couples to marry at Montreal’s Hotel de Ville. That same year, Ortega-Medina and his life partner relocated to the United Kingdom. And on 10 December 2014, pursuant to new legislation supported by Baroness Rabbi Julia Neuberger, the couple solemnized their union in a Jewish wedding ceremony at West London Synagogue, where they are both active members and where Ortega-Medina currently serves as a Senior Warden.

References

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