The Happy Warrior

Lucio Maldonado’s plan was to head to Washington State University for an agricultural degree, then go back to his family’s fruit farms in northern Washington to run them alongside his parents and three brothers. 

But while attending WSU on a Gates Scholarship, he decided to do “fun stuff,” changing majors to political science and psychology with a prelaw option. He buckled down, graduated, and got accepted at Gonzaga University School of Law. In 2019, he joined Corr Cronin, and last year, at 32, became its youngest-ever partner.

He never looked back at those apples and cherries.

Maldonado was part of the Corr Cronin team that won defense verdicts in 2024 for Bayer AG subsidiary Monsanto Company in King County Superior Court against 11 of 15 plaintiffs in a mass toxic-exposure case filed by students and parents at Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe. The plaintiffs, alleging exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls, asked for $4.2 billion in compensatory and punitive damages at trial. They ended up winning four verdicts, totaling $100 million. 

“These were really difficult cases to try, a massive amount of work and energy,” says Emily Harris, co-managing partner at Corr Cronin. “I pride myself on being the first person in and the last person out. But if I came in at 6 in the morning, Lucio was there, and he was there leaving with me at 1 in the morning. I wouldn’t want to be on a case against him.”

He’s a “happy warrior,” says Steve Fogg, the firm’s senior partner. “There’s a smile on his face and a joke on the tip of his tongue. He’s a phenomenal team player, which he probably gets from growing up in a pretty big family team.”

When he applied to the firm, one of Maldonado’s references came from Washington Supreme Court Justice Steve González, the state’s first Mexican-American justice, who met Maldonado in 2018 while teaching a weeklong constitutional law class at Gonzaga. “Lucio questioned everything and made the class interesting, so I offered him a clerkship,” González says. 

Maldonado initially said no since he’d already accepted a clerkship with a lower-court judge. But his family, who supported his decision to go into law, didn’t think much of passing up a Supreme Court clerkship. “His mother told him, ‘Are you kidding?’” González says. “So I talked to that judge and he agreed to let Lucio out of that commitment.”

Maldonado currently handles complex commercial litigation, products liability, and appellate law. “It’s fun to branch out rather than being in one lane,” he says.

Fogg values that versatility. “Any case that’s hard, with a client that needs careful human attention, that’s a Lucio case,” Fogg says.

Lately, he’s been working on white-collar criminal cases, including defending a client accused of conspiring to traffic in approximately $100 million of stolen property. In 2024, federal agents raided the client’s house with armored vehicles and battering rams, seizing millions of dollars in cash and other valuables.

The case is not in the public record and Maldonado can’t offer identifying details. However, he says, he and colleagues discovered there were problems with the search warrant. As a result, he says, the government shut down the investigation and is returning the seized items a year and a half after the raid.

Fogg says Maldonado is particularly effective in representing lawyers facing malpractice claims. “In those cases, I routinely bring in Lucio because he’s so extroverted and attuned to what a client needs. Within a week, not only is that lawyer on board with the program, but he has become a referral source for Lucio.”

Fogg adds: “As you get older, you want to have a feeling that you’re leaving the justice system you dearly love in good hands. When you see someone like Lucio, in his mid-30s, you feel you’re leaving the system not just in good hands but in better hands.”

Case in Point 

Asked about notable legal wins, Maldonado mentions a recent pro bono case in which he represented an African-American woman and her sixth-grade son in a discrimination case against Seattle Public Schools. The woman claimed she was unlawfully barred from picking up her son from school after confronting a crossing guard who, she said, yelled at her on repeated occasions. She attributed his behavior to racism but wasn’t able to prove it.

Maldonado filed a public records request with the Seattle Police Department for body cam footage from the police response to the confrontation. It showed the crossing guard broadly criticizing African Americans, with the school principal standing by. Maldonado brought a case through the school’s administrative law process and won, then threatened to sue unless the school system offered a settlement, which it did.

“She got what she called life-changing money, half of which she put in trust for her kid when he turns 18 and half for her,” Maldonado says. “She’s going to use it for dental work and good food for the kid.”