Wilson M.
Dunlavey
The most challenging part of my work is applying the historical tools of tort law to hold corporations accountable for 21st-century misconduct.
The Well Above Porter Ranch
On October 23, 2015, a well designated SS-25 failed at the Aliso Canyon gas-storage field in the hills above Porter Ranch, California. For nearly four months it vented methane and associated chemicals into the air over the San Fernando Valley — the largest methane leak in United States history. Thousands of families left their homes. Schools relocated their students. Businesses operated through a community-wide disruption while residents reported headaches, nosebleeds, and nausea, and the plume drifted with the weather.
Wilson Dunlavey worked on the plaintiffs' team in the proceedings that produced a $1.8 billion settlement with Sempra Energy in 2021. The legal record had to connect the storage well's condition and operation to the duration and movement of the release, then organize air monitoring, residents' locations, evacuation periods, school disruption, medical complaints, and property effects into thousands of individual claims arising from one facility failure. The settlement resolved more than a defect at one well: it supplied a common process for households whose losses differed in duration and form while preserving the shared cause of their displacement.
Great Books, Then Archives
Before the law there were the books — all of them. At St. John's College in Annapolis, Dunlavey worked through the Great Books curriculum, four years of close engagement with foundational texts in the history of mathematics, science, and philosophy, finishing his degree in 2003. Then came a decade in Germany: a master's from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2011 and a doctorate in modern history in 2015, completed summa cum laude. His dissertation became the book Branding Germany: How a Cultural Identity Was Created, Packaged, and Sold in the United States — a study of how Prussia's ruling class manufactured a national image out of primordial forests, romantic poets, and iron-willed warriors, marketed it to the German-American diaspora, and watched the campaign fail as immigrants chose assimilation and their new lives over the identity being sold to them.
It was training in a particular kind of reading. An archive is the record of what an organization knew, what it said, and what it did, and chronology is what connects the three. Marketing copy, scientific studies, internal correspondence, compliance files, and executive decisions usually arrive separately; the historian's job — and, it turned out, the plaintiff's lawyer's — is to put them back in order until the story they tell cannot be untold. He still works in German.
Berkeley
Dunlavey finished his doctorate and his Berkeley Law degree in the same year, 2015. At Berkeley, a course on multidistrict litigation taught by Lieff Cabraser founding partner Elizabeth Cabraser showed him precisely where the historian's method belonged: coordinated plaintiff-side cases, where common proof, individual claims, federal procedure, and court-supervised resolution all have to remain connected. "Here was a lawyer who was doing exactly what I wanted to do," he has said of that classroom — and he joined her firm, where he says he is learning from her still.
The rest of his law school years pointed the same direction. He volunteered at the Workers' Rights Clinic and successfully represented a client in an administrative hearing in the middle of final examinations. He led the Queer Caucus, spent a semester at the Transgender Law Center, served on the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and, with Christina Farmer, won the 2014 Saul Lefkowitz Trademarks Moot Court Competition. Lieff Cabraser promoted him to partner in 2022, in its New York office. During those eleven years, matters on which he has worked have recovered more than $16 billion for consumers, government entities, small businesses, workers, fishers, and residents — while changing company practices along the way and helping develop the negligence, nuisance, and trespass law that environmental victims now rely on.
The Code Inside the Car
Dunlavey served on leadership teams in the Volkswagen clean-diesel litigation, where the corporate archive contained something historians rarely find: software that confessed. The affected vehicles carried code that recognized laboratory emissions testing and changed engine operation for the duration of the test. On the road, the cars emitted nitrogen oxides far above regulatory limits while being marketed as clean-diesel automobiles.
The 2.0-liter resolution committed up to $10 billion to vehicle buybacks, approved modifications, lease cancellations, and consumer compensation, part of a broader settlement valued at up to $14.7 billion that also funded emissions mitigation and zero-emission-vehicle investments. Separate 3.0-liter consumer agreements provided more than $1.25 billion if repairs were approved and potentially up to $4 billion if buybacks were required, and an agreement with Bosch added $327.5 million for eligible owners and reseller dealers. The settlements arrived in waves — 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022 — as each engine family and defendant was brought to account. Consumer Attorneys of California named him a Consumer Attorney of the Year finalist in 2017, and the American Antitrust Institute honored his private-practice antitrust achievement the same year.
The automotive docket continued from there. Settlements over fuel-economy representations produced $96.5 million and $80 million in recoveries, and in 2024 a $237.5 million settlement with Hino Motor Company compensated U.S. vehicle owners after claims that the company misrepresented its emissions performance and regulatory compliance.
Two Coastal Spills, Three Settlements
In May 2015, a corroded Plains pipeline ruptured near Santa Barbara and sent crude oil into the coastal environment at Refugio. The litigation joined pipeline-condition evidence to spill response, marine effects, property damage, fisheries, and tourism and local business losses, producing a $230 million settlement in 2022 for property owners and fishers and a separate $70 million property-owner settlement in 2024.
The 2021 Huntington Beach spill required a longer chain of proof. An offshore pipeline had been damaged in circumstances associated with ship anchors, which brought pipeline operators and shipping interests into the same litigation; a $95 million settlement reached in 2023 provided relief for fishers, property owners, and local businesses.
The spill cases taught the lesson Dunlavey now names as the most surprising part of the job: how much science the work demands. Metallurgy explains how a pipeline corrodes; oceanography explains where the oil goes; fish-migration science explains what a closed fishery costs; economics converts a boat's lost season and a beach town's empty summer into damages a court can award. He came to the work without a science background — and treats the notion that one is required as the field's most persistent myth.
Benton Harbor
Dunlavey is co-lead class counsel for residents of Benton Harbor, Michigan, who drank lead-contaminated water for years while systemic failures went uncorrected. On June 25, 2026, the federal court granted final approval to an agreement entering a $25 million consent judgment against the City of Benton Harbor and assigning the class the city's rights under its insurance policies.
The $25 million is a consent judgment rather than a presently funded distribution; collection depends on a separate insurance-coverage action. But the approved agreement secured five years of concrete water protections in the meantime: testing every six months under independent monitoring, public reports, resident testing, home-water testing whenever a child's blood-lead result comes back elevated, and continued enforcement at a ten-parts-per-billion action level even if federal requirements become less strict. The agreement also requires cooperation with lead-testing providers, services for affected children, efforts to obtain grants and lower residents' water costs, payment-plan protections against shutoffs, and the city's cooperation in the insurance litigation. The settlement functions as an operating plan for a community's water while the coverage case determines what money can be collected on the judgment.
The Active Docket
The current caseload runs from bases to ballparks to the atmosphere itself. Dunlavey serves on the leadership team representing Marines and their families seeking accountability for the poisoned water they consumed at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune — a decades-long contamination whose proof is, once again, a matter of reconstructing what was known, when, and by whom.
In the Southern District of New York, he sits on the plaintiffs' steering committee in a proposed nationwide class action against Kalshi, which the plaintiffs allege operates an unlicensed and illegal sportsbook presented to the public as a prediction market, and he holds a leadership role in a similar proposed class action against Underdog Fantasy, alleged to run an unlicensed sportsbook in the guise of a fantasy-sports platform.
And in San Francisco County Superior Court, he represents the State of California, as co-counsel with the Attorney General's office, against Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute. The complaint alleges a decades-long campaign of deception about the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, and seeks an abatement fund to pay for the harms; a 2024 amendment added a disgorgement remedy aimed at profits earned through the alleged deception. It is, by scale and stakes, arguably the most significant environmental litigation yet brought — a case whose core exhibit is, fittingly for this lawyer, the gap between what the companies' internal documents said and what their advertisements told the public.
Historical Tools, Modern Records
Dunlavey has described the central challenge of his work as "applying the historical tools of tort law to hold corporations accountable for 21st-century misconduct."
Aliso Canyon required a chronology of a gas release and a community's displacement. The spill cases joined engineering evidence to coastal and commercial losses. Volkswagen connected software behavior, testing protocols, marketing, and consumer remedies. Benton Harbor produced a consent judgment, assigned insurance rights, and a five-year schedule of enforceable water protections. California's climate case turns on the difference between the fossil-fuel companies' internal records and their public statements.
The through-line beyond the docket is the same one that ran through the Workers' Rights Clinic: his pro bono practice includes successfully representing unaccompanied Central American minors in obtaining immigration relief and winning release for people unlawfully detained by immigration authorities, and he serves as secretary of the American Association for Justice's Class Action Litigation Section, helping shape the field he practices in.
He is raising two young children in New York, and he has said that they energize the push to leave behind a cleaner planet. His hobbies are of a piece with the rest: backpacking, urban gardening, and singing nursery rhymes with his children on the streets of New York City — a historian of how stories get sold, teaching the oldest ones for free.