Lisa Gong Guerrero, 46, who is the deputy chief assistant state attorney in the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court, is challenging incumbent Judge Adam K. McGinnis for a seat on the Orange County Court, Group 11, in the Aug. 20 primary.

Early voting takes place Aug. 5-18; check our list for locations. Aug. 8 is the last day to request a mail-in ballot. Vote-by-mail ballots need to be returned to the Supervisor of Elections office by 7 p.m. Aug. 20.

The county court, known as the “Peoples Court,” handles misdemeanors and civil cases under $50,000, explained Gong Guerrero who lives in Maitland with her husband and 9-year-old son.

“People might think, County court is not really that important,” Gong Guerrero told VoxPopuli in an interview. But after supervising the County Court for six years as the state attorney bureau chief, she said she believes it’s even more important than circuit court, which deals with felonies and greater money stakes, simply because the county court system sees more people — and the attorneys are greener.

“You really need to have a judge who kind of serves as a teacher and a gatekeeper to preserve the integrity and the rights of everyone in the courtroom,” she said. “The attorneys assigned to prosecute misdemeanor cases are new law school graduates or attorneys who just passed the bar exam or even law student interns. They are making important decisions about whether or not someone will get a criminal history, whether or not a victim will have their day in court. They're handling really important cases with very little experience.”

Guerrero knows first-hand because she started in the state attorney’s office herself as a certified legal intern, arguing motions and trying cases by her second or third week on the job.

“It was terrifying,” she said. “The supervising attorney would sit with me, but, ultimately, it was my case.

“That's why I think there is such a great need for experienced people on the county court bench. Once they get a little bit more experience, they move up to circuit court, they move up to felony. I picked county court because I feel like I could make a bigger difference in county court.”

A better life

Gong Guerrero emigrated to the U.S. from China in 1983 with her sister and parents when she was 5. Her parents, she told VoxPopuli, were searching for the proverbial better life.

Her father, she said, knew “most of the opportunities in China were given to males. Not a lot of females had opportunities … Seeing how hard it would be for us to have opportunities in China we relocated to Tampa.” She said her father, who had been a teacher in China, worked as a cook and janitor; her mother, a nurse, waited tables.

The sacrifices paid off. The first attorney in her family, Gong Guerrero initially thought she would become an information technology attorney since she had a business and tech degree and had worked at IT consulting company Accenture after college. She said she was making good money but “always felt the void of What am I doing to help the community?” She figured it out when she did an internship in her last year of law school with the state attorney's office.

“I just fell in love with being in the courtroom, arguing, trial advocacy, just doing the right thing, helping the community.”

Gong Guerrero, who is board-certified in criminal trials, has spent 18 years in the Ninth , Judicial Circuit’s state attorney office, serving five state attorneys — Lawson Lamar, Jeffrey Ashton, Aramis Ayala, Monique Worrell and now Andrew Bain. According to her campaign website, Gong Guerrero, a past president of the Greater Orlando Asian American Bar Association, has tried 145 trials ranging from misdemeanors to first-degree murders.

And she’s been steadily promoted. In 2017, she was tapped as the county court bureau chief and in 2022 as the deputy chief of the office, the first Asian-American in each of those positions.

Mentoring from the bench

If elected, Gong Guerrero wants to focus on court room efficiency, something she did at the tech company and in the state attorney’s office.

“Right now the courts are struggling with a huge docket, huge caseloads and people need their day in court in a timely manner. So what I would do is see what I can fix and what I can just make more efficient.”

As a judge, she also wants to continue to mentor and educate attorneys who would appear before her in court as she did when she was supervising the 100 or so prosecuting attorneys as the county court bureau chief. She particularly wants to educate both prosecutors and defense attorneys on the ramifications of driver’s license suspensions: What happens when someone pleads to a case? How often would that result in their license being suspended? How long would it be suspended? How much would it cost to get them reinstated?

She said that county court prosecutors routinely handle about 300 cases and with “so many different types of elements they have to learn, they don’t have a lot of training in driver’s license cases, and neither does the public defenders office.”

Driver’s licenses are often suspended when payments are delayed for traffic tickets and toll violations and court fines and fees. In an area without any significant public transportation, the loss of a driver’s license can mean the loss of a job. Driving on a suspended license carries heftier fines and can even result in jail. Fines And Fees Justice Center, a national research and reform organization, has reported that Florida criminalizes poverty through license suspensions.

“I think if they have all that information, they would be able to make more educated decisions about their cases,” she said. “Being new attorneys, they have so much to learn. So I think either developing training or a guide that we can give to these young attorneys and defenders that come into court, it may help increase the awareness and the penalty and the consequences of these type of cases.”