As the Acting County Counsel, Miguel Márquez oversees all aspects of the Santa Clara County Counsel’s Office and serves as the chief legal advisor to the Board of Supervisors. More than 60 attorneys work in the office, divided into nine busy practice areas. Márquez formerly served as an Assistant County Counsel under prior County Counsel Ann Ravel, who now heads the Tort Division and the Office of Consumer Affairs in the U.S. Department of Justice upon her appointment by President Obama.

Márquez has overseen impact litigation on behalf of County residents—from helping to draft and then defending a menu labeling ordinance that inspired a law to list nutritional information on the menus of all chain restaurants throughout the State, and overseeing a suit against ten major pharmaceutical companies for overcharging public hospitals and other County-operated medical facilities for outpatient drugs (County v. Astra), to successfully objecting to a proposed settlement agreement between the federal government and a set of plaintiffs (Martinez v. Astrue), thereby achieving stronger notice provisions for thousands of beneficiaries nationwide. He also oversaw the filing of an amicus brief in the recent St. John’s Well Child and Family Center, et al. v. Schwarzenegger case challenging the Governor’s so-called blue-pencil budget cuts to vital health and social safety-net programs.

In addition to overseeing the normal heavy workload of the office—for example, in FY 2009 the Litigation Team handled 78 new cases and Workers’ Compensation handled 217 new cases—Márquez has led several innovative initiatives. For example, the General Government Section has been working to develop environmentally-oriented ordinances for the County, focusing on issues such as regulating single-use bags, requiring greener building standards, and addressing climate change. The Health and Hospital Section has worked with the County’s Environmental and Public Health departments to develop an innovative drug take-back system. The Probate Department has teamed with the County’s Adult Protective Services, Public Guardian, and District Attorney’s Office to identify, investigate, and prevent elder financial abuse. Márquez also has supervised the transfer of court facilities to the State and has overseen the County’s efforts in the ongoing Coleman prison litigation in which the State has been ordered to reduce its prison population by more than 40,000 inmates.

Márquez also has given trainings for public agencies on major issues arising under conflicts of interest and ethics rules, areas in which he is a recognized expert, and has taken the lead, along with the County Executive and the Finance Agency, with regard to redevelopment issues and other public finance matters of statewide concern.

Márquez’s prior work in both public sector and private sector law in the Bay Area, as well as in management consulting, trained him well for his current role addressing issues ranging from general government, workers’ compensation, and health and hospitals to education, redevelopment, and finance.

Immediately before joining the Santa Clara County Counsel’s Office, Márquez served as General Counsel for the San Francisco Unified School District (the District), where he managed a multimillion dollar budget and was responsible for all of the District’s legal matters, including providing advice and counsel to the Board of Education, the Superintendent of Schools, and the District’s 35 child development centers; he also had overall responsibility for the District’s Labor Relations Department, managing labor relations with 17 bargaining units representing approximately 9,000 employees. As a major accomplishment in this position, he led the legal effort to pass a large parcel tax to increase teachers’ salaries, especially for those who choose to work in hard-to-staff schools or in hard-to-fill subject areas. He also initiated the process now underway to redesign student assignment policies in order to desegregate schools in the District and decrease the resulting achievement gap.

Before being appointed General Counsel for the District, Márquez served as a Deputy City Attorney in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, working on the General Government and Ethics & Elections teams. This position followed his service as a Deputy County Counsel for San Mateo County, where he was the primary legal counsel for the County’s three community colleges, the Controller’s Office, and the Special Education Local Plan Area, in addition to representing nine school districts and the San Mateo County of Education. One of the many cases he worked on resulted in a major recovery of fees for the County’s Inmate Welfare Trust Fund. Before joining San Mateo, Márquez worked at Cooley Godward LLP as a transactional lawyer. He also worked on constitutional law and policy matters at Remcho, Johansen & Purcell, including the 2001 post-Census redistricting of Senate, Assembly, Congressional, and State Board of Equalization seats.

Prior to law school, Márquez worked as a Management Consultant at KPMG Peat Marwick in Sacramento, California, where he was part of a national financial and organizational consulting practice.

Márquez received his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, his Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University, and his B.A. degree in Public Policy from Stanford University.

Born in California, Márquez’s commitment to public service in part grows out of his early public school experiences. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Mexico, with his mother holding only two months of formal education and his father four years. Spanish was Márquez’s first language. Head Start programs, therefore, were critical to his early education. These formative experiences gave impetus to his early career as a school lawyer and more generally inspired his commitment to providing opportunities and a safety net to those who need them.

• Board of Supervisors Appoint Miguel Márquez as Acting County Counsel