Mona Lisa Wallace

That year she began handling cancer litigation. Her asbestos clients worked in power plants, in mills and in insulation. Her father, a Navy veteran, had asbestosis.

In the early 1990s, she opposed a proposed asbestos settlement that would have barred future claims by people not yet diagnosed. She asked Public Justice for help, she has said, and the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Wrong Side of the Tracks

Wallace was born and raised in Salisbury and Spencer. She grew up, she has said, “on the wrong side of the tracks,” learned about fairness on playing fields with mostly underprivileged children, and wanted to be a lawyer from the sixth grade. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1976 and from Wake Forest University School of Law, with honors, in 1979, in a class with few women.

Back in Salisbury, a small Southern town, she had a hard time finding work. Graham Carlton, a part-time minister, hired her. Her early cases were family law, representing victims of domestic abuse. After a few years with Carlton, she opened her own firm, Wallace & Graham, in Salisbury; Bill Graham is a partner there, as is her daughter, Whitney Wallace Williams.

In the early 2000s the firm moved into class actions over medical and retirement benefits, payday lending, car-dealer practices and environmental harm. Its class cases include Merkner v. AK Steel ($170 million, 2010), Inetianbor v. CashCall ($10 million in restitution, 2017) and the Outer Banks power-outage case ($10.35 million, 2018). She has also co-counseled with the U.S. Department of Justice on False Claims Act claims over medical billing.

Out of Respect for the Neighbors

Kinlaw Farms, a contract grower in rural Bladen County, kept nearly 15,000 hogs a year for Murphy-Brown, LLC, the hog-production subsidiary of Smithfield Foods. The hogs produced about 153,000 pounds of feces and urine a day. The waste went into three open-air pits holding millions of gallons, in view of the neighbors’ homes, and about eight million gallons a year were sprayed into the air: in summer, three to five days a week, for an average of six hours a day. Dumpsters in open fields held rotting carcasses that drew dozens of buzzards and flies onto the neighbors’ properties. On one night in 2016, at least 12 trucks passed through to the farm between midnight and six in the morning.

One neighbor testified that “there’s not a day we don’t have trouble with buzzards.” Another said she heard “hogs squealing all the time,” and a third said the traffic annoyed her “all the time, day and night.” Murphy-Brown told its growers to avoid spraying “out of respect for [their] neighbors” when they knew the neighbors had planned weddings or cookouts. The spraying still came regularly.

Lagoon and Spray

From 2013 to 2020, Wallace represented about 500 eastern North Carolina neighbors of hog operations in private-nuisance suits against Murphy-Brown over its “lagoon and spray” system of waste disposal. The suits were filed in state court in 2013 and refiled in federal court in 2014. “We didn’t sue any of the farmers in any of the federal cases,” she said. She has called the litigation “a David versus Goliath story.”

The trial record showed that Murphy-Brown owned the hogs and supplied the feed. The company “imposes standard operating procedures for all of its contract growers,” it “wrote the policy dictating how Kinlaw Farms disposed of the waste,” and it “was solely responsible for the Kinlaw Farms trucking schedule.” On alternative waste technologies, it admitted that it “could have its growers change to such technologies if it so chose.”

A Castle for Those Who Reside in It

Senior U.S. District Judge W. Earl Britt coordinated 26 related cases on a master docket. In the spring of 2018, a jury in McKiver v. Murphy-Brown awarded each of ten neighbors of Kinlaw Farms $75,000 in compensatory damages; with punitive damages, the verdict totaled $50,750,000. Five juries found for the neighbors in trials in 2018 and 2019, with awards exceeding $500 million.

While the case was pending, North Carolina enacted House Bill 467 on May 11, 2017, limiting nuisance damages to the reduction in a property’s fair market or rental value. On appeal, Wallace and John Hughes of her firm were on the neighbors’ brief with Tanya Fridland, and Tillman J. Breckenridge argued.

On November 19, 2020, the Fourth Circuit affirmed the liability verdict. Judge Stephanie Thacker wrote that “the 2017 RTFA amendment represents a substantive, forward-looking change in the law,” and the court affirmed that compensatory damages beyond property or rental value remained available. Murphy-Brown’s post-verdict termination of Kinlaw, the court held, “cannot retroactively make Kinlaw Farms a necessary party.” “Lawful enterprises can constitute a nuisance in fact,” the opinion said. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, concurring, described “outrageous conditions at Kinlaw Farms” and wrote that “whether a home borders a golf course or a dirt road, it is a castle for those who reside in it.”

In November 2020, Smithfield announced that it had settled the hog-nuisance lawsuits, including cases already decided by juries; the financial terms were not disclosed. Wallace said the team was “thrilled at the positive outcome for our clients and the environment.”

The Water at Camp Lejeune

From 1953 to 1987, two of the eight water systems at Camp Lejeune were contaminated, and a third received contaminated water intermittently during shortages. Wallace has described the water as “highly contaminated with very, very bad carcinogens.” By the August 2024 deadline, the Navy had received 408,860 administrative claims under the Camp Lejeune Justice Act; a Justice Department status report in February 2026 counted 3,718 claimants who had gone on to sue.

On July 19, 2023, the federal court in the Eastern District of North Carolina appointed a Plaintiffs’ Leadership Group, with J. Edward Bell III as lead counsel and Wallace as co-lead counsel with Zina Bash, Elizabeth J. Cabraser, W. Michael Dowling, Robin L. Greenwald and James A. Roberts III. She has also represented military families in suits against the private landlords of base housing at Camp Lejeune, Fort Bragg and Fort Belvoir.

Six Months

Case Management Order No. 4, entered in 2023, sets the procedure for preserving testimony early. A petition can rest on a declaration that a health-care provider has told the witness that “within the next six months he or she is likely to become unable to testify,” or on the provider’s own letter; absent unusual circumstances, such a petition is not challenged for lacking good cause. Counsel meet and confer within ten days to schedule the deposition. If a dispute arises when the court is not available, “the deposition shall continue with full reservation of rights by all parties for a ruling at the earliest possible time.”

On November 12, 2025, the leadership group asked the court to set a Track 1 bellwether trial date in early 2026, beginning with kidney cancer cases, because claimants were aging and some were dying before their cases were resolved. “It is time to give America’s poisoned Marines their day in Court,” the group wrote. By April 2026, the four federal judges assigned to the litigation had ruled against the government in recent orders, and about two dozen bellwether cases, chosen to represent each illness linked to the contamination, appeared headed for trial.

Asked how she measures her legal achievements, Wallace has pointed to her clients’ quality of life. “You cannot judge success by the amount of money recovered,” she said.