CHAPTER 37
WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
—Andy Warhol
As the judges of the Fourth Circuit deliberate over the appeal, accolades start to pour in to the office of Wallace & Graham. In late February, the Southern Trial Lawyers Association honors Mona Lisa Wallace with the Tommy Malone Great American Eagle Award. The award, one of the most prestigious in the southern bar, gestures at something more empyrean than success in the courtroom. It is about the soul of a lawyer, about dignity, integrity, and bravery. In keeping with its namesake, Tommy Malone, a New South trailblazer who fought for society’s castaways and championed civil rights, its recipients are defenders of the downtrodden, friends of the oppressed. Since the award was established fourteen years ago, all the honorees have been men.
Mona makes history as the first woman.
The ceremony is held in New Orleans, at the Ritz-Carlton on the fringes of the French Quarter. It’s a Thursday just before Mardi Gras, and the ballroom is full of chatter and good cheer, the men wearing black tie and the women bedecked in regalia suited to the locale, some of the dresses fancy enough for a Royal Street ball. No masks are in sight, but there are beads and long necklaces festooned with eagles and fashioned after the American flag.
Mona is not alone at the head table. Her daughter, Whitney, is there with her, as are Monica and Buster Farrington, Maryclaire’s parents, and two other friends from Salisbury. Together, they watch as the 2019 honoree, Chuck Monnett, strides to the podium. He is from North Carolina, too, a personal injury attorney from Charlotte, and he is a friend of Mona’s, though that is not saying much—so many people are friends of Mona Wallace.
Monnett breaks the ice with a play on words. “I’m terrified,” he says, surveying the audience, his mustachioed grin barely concealed. “I’m afraid that I lack the skills to tell you just how special Mona Lisa Wallace is, and how much she deserves this award.”
His tribute to her is effulgent. Mona is a pathbreaker, he says, a woman who shattered the glass ceiling of small-town law in the South. Monnett traces the arc of Mona’s star from her early days handling divorce work to the break she made with domestic practice to take up on behalf of the injured, the sick, and the abused.
“Few lawyers have done more good for more people than Mona Lisa Wallace,” remarks Monnett. “In terms of the sheer number of dollars recovered, in terms of the sheer number of clients whose lives have been changed for the good, there is no lawyer more successful in North Carolina than this fine lady right here.”
Monnett regales the crowd with colorful stories from Mona’s trophy wall—the stuffed heads of modern-day robber barons she has brought home from the courtroom. He talks about her campaign against Duke Energy years before, about the payday lenders and car dealership scammers and steel magnates who bilked their employees out of retirement benefits that she has chastened and forced to change.
“What do you do after you’ve had all that success?” Monnett asks. “Well, you decide that you’re going to take on the largest pork producer in the world.”
Ripples of laughter radiate through the crowd.
“For years, she fought them. Five cases went to trial. Five plaintiffs’ verdicts. The largest verdict ever returned in North Carolina.”
Monnett shares a quote from Harvie Wilkinson’s soliloquy at the Fourth Circuit, the old jurist’s musings on the power imbalances in hog country, and the audience erupts in applause.
But Monnett isn’t quite finished. He reprises Mona’s public interest work, the years she has poured into Public Justice. He talks about her family and her philanthropy in Salisbury, the way she and Lee have invested in the public schools, the cancer center they endowed. There is so much more Monnett could say, so many points he missed in the service of brevity. He summons Mona to the stage and surrenders the podium, draping one of the beaded eagle necklaces over her head.
Mona is a longtime veteran of the stump, and she knows so many people in the room, but still she is nervous, humbled. She shares a quote about Tommy Malone’s passion for civil rights, the way he framed the fight to which he devoted his life. It wasn’t just a racial issue to him. It was a power struggle, a struggle for the powerless against the powerful.
“I think that’s why I keep taking these cases,” she says. “The Smithfield case almost killed me. It’s been seven years. We tried five federal trials back-to-back in 2018 and 2019, and I was away from my family for two years—my children, my grandchildren. All of us who do these cases know what a sacrifice it is, and so do our family members.” She offers a précis of the story. It is not exactly fodder for the dinner table, and the clatter of silverware fades away. The raw truth of it can’t be euphemized. Mona’s voice takes on a trace of her own revulsion, as if to say, “Can you believe this? Can you believe what these people lived with?”
She wraps up swiftly yet gracefully, sharing the praise. “None of us can do what we do without each other,” she says. She talks about her lawyers, the effort they pour into her cases, and the support she has received. Then she waves and steps away from the podium.
Before she can return to her seat, however, Chuck Monnett lifts the award itself off the display table and places it in her hands. It is a soaring eagle sculpted out of bronze, beak curled and talons out, eyes locked on its prey. The symbolism could not be more apt. If Mona has a totem, it is a mother eagle—fierce and protective, noble and deadly, a friend you want, an enemy you don’t. It is also the antitype of Boss Hog’s own bronze sculpture—the wild boar, crafty and fearsome, resting on its haunches outside the Mad Boar Restaurant in Wallace. In Judge Britt’s courtroom, the marauder of the forest met the queen of the skies.
As in the state of nature, the sky always wins.
With the hog farm trials suspended for the time being, the turning earth seems to slow on its axis, returning a measure of normalcy to the lives of the plaintiffs and their lawyers. For Elsie Herring and Lendora Farland, Woodell McGowan and Joyce Messick, that means going back to work and spending more time with family, volunteering in their neighborhoods and endeavoring, to the best of their ability, not to dwell on the Damoclean sword hanging over their legal claims. The outcome has never been in their hands. It’s in the hands of God.
The fracture lines in their community—blown into chasms by the jury verdicts—are still visible in the looks they receive in public and the whispers traded behind their backs. They will forever be marked by the stand they have taken. But this is the world they have known since they were children. And it is still a world that knows them. With the passage of time, the hog country faithful put away their yard signs, dial down the apocalyptic chatter on Facebook, and leave the neighbors alone. This peace, while perhaps artificial, feels like a mercy.
Many of the plaintiffs, especially those whose cases have been tried, stay in touch with Mona and Mike and the rest of the legal team while they await the Fourth Circuit’s ruling. They are friends now, not just clients. When they pick up the phone or send a text, it isn’t solely to ask for an update about the case. Sometimes they just want to say hello, to share something that happened to them, to maintain the connection they have built over so many years now.
For Mona, the return to normalcy means more time at the firm. At this stage in her career, one could forgive her for easing off the accelerator, taking up painting or yoga, and spending weeks at her beach house—or, better yet, leaving her law practice in the capable hands of Bill and John and Whitney, and embarking on an adventure with Lee. After all, she’s sixty-six years old, and Lee is a decade older. But work is what she loves most, after her family. It’s in her brain chemistry, the watermark of her personality. Even when she’s at the beach, sky bright and waves rolling in, she can’t settle down. For the people who love her, it’s a source of constant humor. Without a malefactor in her sights, she doesn’t know what to do with herself. The only time she seems at ease and undistracted is when she’s with her grandkids. They get her full attention.
Linda Wike likes to joke that Mona will work until she dies: “I think I’m going to find her in this place one day years down the road. I can’t see her ever leaving this place. Which means I will never leave this place.” It’s an oath Linda swore early in their collaboration, that she won’t quit until Mona quits. Given Mona’s stamina and corporate America’s penchant for malfeasance, that day is likely many horizons away. Until then, in rain, snow, and sunshine, Mona will show up at the firm at nine in the morning, having worked in one way or another since the moment her head rose from the pillow, and she will labor until six or seven at night, her intensity never wavering, her smile always within reach. With a track record like hers, there is no shortage of cases for her to choose from.
She sues Bank of America, alleging that the nation’s fourth-largest mortgage lender has been creating unwanted, yet lucrative, escrow accounts on mortgages where the borrower agreed to pay property taxes and insurance directly. In addition, after the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in North Carolina turns a Salisbury nursing home into a morgue, she takes the grieving families under wing and sues the company behind the facility—as well as its New York–based private equity owners—for gross negligence. It’s a pro bono case at this stage, no money in it for the firm. But this is Mona’s hometown. She can’t allow such a wrong to stand unchallenged. As with the Smithfield cases, she wants to force the corporate retirement industry to change.
And it isn’t just Mona on the hunt. Bill Graham is on the front lines of the mesothelioma wars, suing the manufacturers of asbestos products for lung damage and wrongful death. Not long ago, he landed a $32 million verdict on behalf of the widow of a tire-plant worker—the largest single-plaintiff verdict in the state.
The wheel of litigation at Wallace & Graham is like the wheel of time. Justice doesn’t sleep. So neither do Mona and Bill.
Mike Kaeske, by contrast, takes the interlude as an excuse to get outside. He has spent the last five years—in his book, a complete life cycle—on the hog farm cases, and he is ready to trade in his suits for hiking boots. He grabs a few of his buddies, including Shane Rogers, and leads a trek across the highlands of Wyoming’s Wind River Range.
After meandering through snow-capped peaks and glacier-fed lakes, they deploy their pack rafts on the waters of the Green River and follow the jade-tinted snake out of the wilderness. On the trail and around the campfire, Mike allows himself to unwind. He is a humorist and raconteur, swapping jokes and telling stories under the spangled cape of stars. But he never quite relinquishes his edge.
Not long after the trip, Kaeske ventures out again, this time with a new crew, exploring the ruins of Navajo villages and camping on the rim of Cedar Mesa in Utah, within sight of the great rock spires of the Valley of the Gods. He also takes Haven to Cabo, her happy place, and goes heli-skiing in Alaska. He is in no rush to reenter the arena, to take on a new client. His heart is still with the hog cases. He’s still using pig emojis in his text messages, still talking with Mona and Daniel on the phone all the time. Until the Fourth Circuit delivers its ruling, he will find other ways to amuse himself, to push his tachometer to the red line.
With spring comes the Covid quarantine and an eerie kind of quiet. The weeks trickle into months like rivulets into a stream. Streets everywhere are empty and storefronts dark. At last, summer blossoms with the spark of surprise, and states across the country experiment with reopening. Cars flood the streets and people start to eat out again. Restive crowds flock to beaches and parks, and protesters march for racial justice.
The Fourth Circuit, however, remains silent.
The delay starts to drag, to weigh down the lawyers when they permit themselves to think about it. The court should have ruled by May or June. But June flies by in a haste, and then the dog days of July, and still the announcement doesn’t come. Mona wakes up to the same thought each morning: Surely it will be today. But then today, too, passes without word from Richmond.
Something else arrives in its place—an award from Public Justice, one of America’s premier public interest legal organizations. The hog farm team wins Trial Lawyer of the Year. It’s the third occasion in as many years that Mona has made the short list. In 2018, she shared the top honor with her payday lending suits. Last year in San Diego, she and the others on the hog farm team came in second place. This year, however, the award is theirs alone. The ceremony is held remotely, over Zoom, with Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist, hosting the event from Los Angeles. Erin is yet another friend of Mona’s. They share a kindred spirit.
Mona accepts the honor graciously, on behalf of the team. They are there with her at the firm—Bill Graham and John Hughes, Whitney and Daniel, Mark Doby and Linda Wike. Only Mike Kaeske and Lisa Blue can’t be there in person. They are watching the livestream. Mona’s speech is not scripted. She speaks off the cuff about her team, praises the plaintiffs for their bravery, and offers a tribute to Mike for his courtroom brilliance. Given the constraints of Zoom, the coronation takes place in silence, shorn of applause. But the audience’s reaction is not difficult to imagine. Mona is a beloved figure at Public Justice, and the Smithfield litigation has been a modern-day War of the Roses.
Yet, still, the question remains unanswered: How will this story end? All five hundred of Mona’s clients, all of her employees at the firm, all of the lawyers and staff around Mike and Lisa out west, are suspended in the inkwell of unknowing. They are waiting for daylight.
And then it comes. On the Thursday before Thanksgiving, the Fourth Circuit rules.
Shortly after nine o’clock, the electronic notice from the court lands in the inboxes of Mona and John Hughes, but neither of them sees it. They are in the big conference room, taking a Zoom deposition in the nursing home Covid case. Tillman Breckenridge is the first to catch the news. He shoots Mike Kaeske a text message, saying the opinion has dropped. But the sun has yet to rise over Park City. Kaeske is still asleep. It’s only the biggest moment of the year for all of them, and one of the most important appellate rulings of their careers. Yet it floats in the digital ether until, at last, Kaeske wakes up and checks his phone.
He sends a text to Daniel Wallace, Mark Doby, and John Hughes, along with a screenshot of Tillman’s message from two hours ago. “Who has read the opinion?”
Daniel and Mark reply in unison: “Oh fuck, send it to us.”
To which Kaeske responds: “I don’t have it. 144 pages.”
At this point, alerted by the now incessant vibration of his phone, John Hughes wrests his focus from the carnage unfolding on the Zoom screen—Mona is in the process of skewering the COO of the elder-care management company for its dereliction of duty—and comprehends the situation in a glance. He gathers his laptop and relocates to the corner of the room to skim the opinion. Soon, he thinks better of it and decamps to his office, where he huddles with Daniel and Mark to pore over the court’s words. Even with the amplifying effect of an adrenaline-fueled mind-meld, the three of them don’t appreciate it right away. It takes time for their eyes to adjust to the brilliance of the light, for their ears to recognize the sing-song peal of the bells.
While Steven Agee issued an impassioned dissent, fulfilling every trope of the right-leaning, pro-business jurist, Harvie Wilkinson and Stephanie Thacker agreed with the neighbors on almost every point. And where they quibbled with Judge Britt—in their view, he shouldn’t have allowed the jury to consider the profits of WH Group and the salaries of the hog giant’s executives in calculating its verdict—they refused to order a new trial. Their remedy was modest: a hearing at which the trial court would recalibrate the punitive damages award without reference to corporate profits and salaries. Practically, such an undertaking could easily produce an identical outcome. To comply with the Fourth Circuit’s order, Judge Britt could simply reimpose the amount of punitive damages permitted by the statutory cap—three times the compensatory award—and the plaintiffs would not lose a dime.
John Hughes and his young associates bring Mike Kaeske into the loop by phone and dispel his doomsday anxieties. After that, John scribbles a few words on a notepad and races back to the conference room to inform Mona. She’s at a pivotal juncture in the nursing home deposition, and she waves him away, barely glancing at the pad. But the message is enough to give her pause.
“HOG OPINION IN.”
She blinks, processing the implications at light speed. As if reading her mind, John delivers her a thumbs up. Mona nods, relief cascading through her body. She takes a breath, then sets her elation aside and returns to the Zoom screen. Her duty is to her clients.
It is thirty minutes before Mona wraps up the inquisition and glides into the lunch room, a star-bright twinkle in her eyes. Daniel and Mark are there, along with John Hughes, Whitney, and Linda Wike. When they see her in the doorway, all of them start talking at once. Everyone has a comment, a quote, an impression to share. The volume builds until they are almost yelling. Later on, none of them will recall the particulars. But they will remember the ecstasy, the Technicolor beauty of their communal release.
They will remember the sound of victory.