Vilma Socorro Martínez then joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. At LDF, she defended a number of poor and minority clients. She also served as the attorney for the petitioner in the case of Griggs v. Duke Power Company, a landmark action that ultimately went before the U.S. Supreme Court and helped establish the doctrine of affirmative action. In 1970, Martínez became an equal opportunity counselor for the New York State Division of Human Rights, where, she created new rules and procedures governing the rights of employees. In 1971 she joined the firm of Cahill, Gordon & Reindel in New York City, where she worked as a labor lawyer. She was among the first women to join the board of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Soon afterward, in 1973, Martínez was hired as the advocacy organization's general counsel and president. She directed a program to help secure an extension of the Voting Rights Act to include Mexican Americans among the groups it protected. In 1975, Congress agreed to extend the existing provisions of the Voting Rights Act to include Mexican Americans. Martínez also helped obtain a 1974 ruling guaranteeing that non-English-speaking children in public schools could obtain bilingual education and participated in a number of other activities on behalf of Mexican Americans. From 1977 to 1981, Vilma Socorro Martínez joined an advisory board that reviewed appointments to ambassadorial positions around the world. In 1982, Vilma Socorro Martínez became a partner at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, specializing in resolving labor disputes. Since the 1990s, she was a consultant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and a lawyer delegate to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference.
US ambassador to Argentina
In 2009, Vilma Socorro Martínez was named United States Ambassador to Argentina, the first woman to represent the United States in Buenos Aires as ambassador. She had never been to Argentina before accepting the position. Her role included the diplomatic management of the NASA-CONAE project that launched the SAC-D satellite into space, She ended her tenure in Argentina on July 4, 2013. In a cable leaked by WikiLeaks, she described Mauricio Macri, who intended to run for the 2011 elections, as "uneducated". Il also appeared that he asked Vilma Socorro Martínez to be stiffer with then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
