Mona Lisa Wallace
Environmental Nuisance · Toxic Exposure · Complex Civil Litigation
The Man Who Could Not Breathe
In early 1981, a man walked into a young lawyer's office in Salisbury, North Carolina, because he could not breathe.
The lawyer was Mona Lisa Wallace, not long out of law school, and what the man carried in his lungs — asbestos, breathed in over a working life — would set the course of hers. She took his case, and then the cases of the men who worked beside him, and became one of the first and most successful asbestos trial lawyers in the Southeast, at a time when those cases were brutally hard to win and the defendants were among the largest corporations in the world. Over the decades that followed, she litigated thousands of claims for workers whose illnesses arrived years after the exposures that caused them.
She has been representing people who could not breathe — because of a factory, a lagoon, or a water supply — ever since.
Salisbury and Spencer
Wallace was born and raised in Salisbury and neighboring Spencer, small railroad-country towns in the North Carolina Piedmont. In high school she was elected the first female student body president. The pattern — first through the door, then holding it open — never really stopped.
She earned her law degree from Wake Forest University in 1979 and came home to practice, only to find that a woman trial lawyer was a novelty a small Southern town did not know what to do with. A kind man named Graham Carlton — a lawyer who was also a part-time minister — hired her when others would not. Her first work was family law, representing victims of domestic abuse: in court every day, arguing against the most difficult and adversarial opponents a young lawyer could face. It was, in hindsight, a trial academy.
Within a few years she founded her own firm, Wallace & Graham, in her hometown — where it remains, punching far above its weight, with her daughter Whitney Wallace Williams now a partner alongside her.
Half a Mile from Kinlaw Farms
Ten families lived within roughly half a mile of Kinlaw Farms in Bladen County. The operation housed nearly 15,000 hogs, which generated approximately 153,000 pounds of feces and urine every day. The waste dropped through slatted floors into three open-air lagoons holding millions of gallons, and from there it was sprayed onto surrounding fields — approximately eight million gallons a year, in summer as often as three to five days a week, about six hours at a time. Trucks ran the entrance road near the homes day and night. Boxes of carcasses drew buzzards and flies.
The neighbors closed their windows. They stopped using their porches and gardens. They gave up outdoor meals and rearranged when relatives could visit. Company policy told growers to avoid spraying when the neighbors had planned a wedding or a cookout — an instruction that conceded everything about what the spraying did to a home.
Beginning in 2013, Wallace and a larger plaintiffs' team represented approximately 500 eastern North Carolina residents in private-nuisance actions against the integrated producer behind the operations. The strategic choice defined the litigation: responsibility belonged not to the contract grower down the road but to Murphy-Brown — Smithfield's hog-production division — which supplied the animals and feed, imposed the operating procedures, set the animal counts, controlled the waste system and the truck schedules, and could have required better technology at any time.
Five Trials and McKiver
Five cases went to juries in 2018 and 2019. Each one demanded the same double discipline: the proof had to stay personal — a nuisance claim lives or dies on substantial interference with a particular family's property — while connecting every missed cookout and closed window to operational and corporate evidence about the facilities and the company that controlled them.
McKiver v. Murphy-Brown became the published appellate decision. Wallace, John Hughes, and Tanya Fridland appeared on the appellees' brief, with Tillman Breckenridge arguing. The Fourth Circuit preserved compensatory liability and the legal basis for punitive damages, and rejected the argument that the contract grower was an indispensable party.
The appeal also protected the claims from a legislative rescue attempt. Three years after McKiver was filed, North Carolina amended its Right to Farm Act to limit nuisance damages largely to changes in market or rental value. The Fourth Circuit held the amendment was a substantive change that could not erase claims already filed — preserving the neighbors' right to recover for the lived interference with their yards, porches, and daily routines, not merely for a line on an appraisal. The remaining hog-nuisance cases later resolved on negotiated terms.
Public Justice has twice named Wallace its national Trial Lawyer of the Year, and in 2020 the Southern Trial Lawyers Association made her the first woman to receive its Tommy Malone Great American Eagle Award.
Camp Lejeune
Wallace now serves as court-appointed co-lead counsel for plaintiffs in the federal Camp Lejeune Water Litigation in the Eastern District of North Carolina — claims under the Camp Lejeune Justice Act arising from decades of contaminated drinking water at the Marine base. J. Edward Bell III serves as lead counsel; Wallace shares co-lead responsibilities with Elizabeth Cabraser, Robin Greenwald, Zina Bash, W. Michael Dowling, and James Roberts III.
The leadership work spans common discovery, coordination with the United States, claimant evidence, motion practice, trial preparation, and negotiation. One piece of the structure carries particular urgency. Under Case Management Order No. 4, counsel may petition to preserve the testimony of a witness whose prognosis makes it likely they will be unable to testify within six months — a good-faith declaration, a healthcare provider's letter, notice, and examination procedures, with disputes reserved if a judge is unavailable mid-deposition. Exposure at the base may be decades old, but illness accelerates on its own schedule, and the order ensures a dying veteran's account survives even if the veteran does not live to give it in court.
The structure is producing results. As of July 17, 2026, settlement offers across the Camp Lejeune claims system exceeded $968 million, and payouts exceeded $801 million.
Wallace & Graham
Wallace is the founding partner of Wallace & Graham in Salisbury, where her practice spans environmental nuisance, toxic exposure, occupational disease, mass torts, consumer claims, and employee-benefit litigation. She is a founding member of the American Museum of Tort Law, a longtime supporter of Public Justice, and a recipient of the North Carolina Advocates for Justice's Ebbie Award.
She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University School of Law — and still practices a short drive from the office where a man once walked in because he could not breathe.