The Verdict

he largest-ever jury award in Washington state history, a stunning $857 million, was announced in King County Superior Court on Dec. 18, 2023. The defendant was Monsanto, manufacturer of chemicals that five students and two parent volunteers at a Monroe school say leaked from the light fixtures and sickened them.

“We are a small firm—four partners, two associates—and this was a toxic tort against a billion-dollar international company,” says Felix Gavi Luna, who practices plaintiff’s personal injury law at PWRFL in Seattle. “You’re in court every day against a client with aggressive, phenomenal lawyers. They have a blank check to fight everything, so you fight everything, and it’s nine weeks of up all night, in the trenches, fighting the fight.”

Also on the team were Michael Wampold, Luna’s colleague at PWRFL in Seattle; Southern California lawyers Keith Bruno and Theresa Hatch, with TL4J in Irvine and Carlsbad, respectively; and Friedman | Rubin of Bremerton, which brought the original case in 2021. The cross-examinations were shared; Luna wrapped things up in closing arguments.

Monsanto, which was purchased in 2018 by German pharmaceutical company Bayer, says it stopped manufacturing PCBs in 1977. The chemicals, created in the 1920s to insulate and lubricate, were banned in the U.S. in 1978 because of concerns they might be toxic and carcinogenic. A 2015 article in Environmental Science and Pollution Research International estimated at least 12,960 schools in the U.S. still contain PCBs in caulking and sealing materials.

Luna and his team argued that these chemicals were defective products under Washington law, and that Monsanto failed to warn the public about the health risks. The seven plaintiffs, along with more than 150 other children and adults who spent time at Sky Valley Education Center, claim they suffered various health impacts such as endocrine problems, neurological and autoimmune issues and developmental disorders.

The cases are being handled by several law firms; Luna’s team has another big group planned for litigation next year.

The medical and scientific information was highly complex, and strongly disputed by Monsanto. King County Superior Court Judge Jim Rogers later reduced the award to $438 million, based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling limiting the amount of punitive damages allowed in comparison to compensatory. Monsanto’s appeal, on various grounds, is working its way through the courts.

Luna, who has been at PWRFL since 2007 (when it was Peterson Young Putra), was also involved in a 2022 Monsanto trial that awarded $82 million to another former Sky Valley student. Other cases include a $10 million wrongful-death settlement in 2023 against King County in the fatal stabbing of a building maintenance worker by a mentally ill tenant who had become aggressive and was being evicted. Sheriff’s deputies couldn’t find the tenant and left the premises before the attack; the suit claimed they violated policy regarding eviction and left the scene before the eviction was completed.

Wiry, with a ready sense of humor and a mop of black hair (which his associates entreat him to cut before he goes to trial), Luna has an open nature that strikes a response in others. “Felix grew up in the real world and can talk to real people,” says Wampold, a friend since law school. “And part of the magic is that he’s not just really great with jurors. They love him, but so do judges.”

Rando Wick, a medical malpractice defense attorney at Johnson Graffe, Keay, Moniz & Wick who has faced Luna in the courtroom, agrees: “He presents the medicine in a way that is understandable to a lay jury. He can communicate to really smart people, but he can also communicate with everyday folk.”
But Luna’s congenial personality belies his professional intensity. “He works his cases up very well,” Wick says. “He gets very good experts. Some cases, I can outwork my opponents. I don’t know if I can outwork Felix.”

Luna grew up in the public housing projects of Cambridge, Massachusetts. “From the time he was a child, Felix was always debating something, and doing so with brilliance,” recalls lifelong friend Dennis Benzan. “That was, in some ways, his training to become a lawyer.”

Even so, Luna’s journey to the law was not an easy one. Columbia Terrace is nestled between Harvard and MIT, but culturally and economically it’s a world apart.

“It’s a poor, brown-Black community, Spanish-speaking, primarily,” says Luna, whose father is from Puerto Rico. “But it was nice as a kid—you don’t realize what you don’t have, because nobody has anything.”
Benzan adds, “The entire neighborhood looked out for each other. If your mom was coming home with groceries, you’d stop playing stickball and help her. … We all played together in the courtyard; that was how we learned to take care of each other, fight for each other.”

But it was far from idyllic. “A number of my family members were caught up in the justice system,’’ Luna says. For example, when Luna was in high school, he had relatives targeted by gang members. In addition, his father was sentenced to 25 years, and some of the details in that case still bother Luna. “Those were some of my inspirations for becoming a lawyer.”

His father, also named Felix, spent 2 ½ years in federal prison before being paroled. Though he was mostly absent during Luna’s childhood, they’ve always been close. Luna’s dad had 15 children, nine of them raised by Luna’s mom, Gail.

The family relied heavily on public assistance. “I used to go and sweep the hallways to raise money to get [my dad] out of jail,” Luna recalls. “There was no real stigma attached—there were very few adult males around, mostly single mothers. You don’t know any different. It was just your life.”

In the mid-1980s, the crack cocaine epidemic shattered the community. Then a fire destroyed half the complex. That was it for Gail. She pulled Luna and eight siblings out of the chaos and moved across the country to join her sister in south Seattle. Luna, then 14, was not happy about being uprooted.

“I didn’t want to come here,” he says. “I remember thinking I could lie down in the street and no one is going to run me over for hours. … This is weird.” Now, of course, the Seattle area is home. Luna and his two children, Gavi, 17, and Olivia, 3, live in Skyway, as do several brothers and sisters—and his mom, for whom Luna bought a house as soon as he got out of law school. She and her son get together to watch Jeopardy!, and he enjoys running with brother Wuaca.

When the family arrived in Seattle, Luna was enrolled in the gifted program at Rainier Beach High School, where his advisers saw a talented kid, motivated and good at math, and encouraged him to go into engineering. “They said, ‘People of color, young men, should pursue science, because there’s not enough of you.’ But I didn’t really have the aptitude for high-level physics and math.”

As an undergraduate at the University of Washington, Luna took a sociology class called The History of Deviance. He recalls, “It was just a fascinating class—what leads to deviancy and crime—and it was my lived experience. The concept was, if everybody’s broke or everybody’s rich, there’s little crime.”
Luna decided to major in society and justice, and made up his mind to go to UW law school.

“That’s the place where I found my voice and evolved into a lawyer,” he says.

Luna graduated with highest honors in 1997 into a job market that offered many big-law opportunities. He went with an externship with the county public defender’s office.

“Near the end of my time there,” he says, “I went to the director’s office and told him, ‘I think I want to be a public defender.’ He looked at me—he was African American—and he said, ‘You cannot be a public defender.’ I said, ‘Why not?’, and he said, ‘When I was coming up 25 years ago, no law firms would look at young African-American or Latino men for jobs—I didn’t have an opportunity like that. You have an option to go do something that none of us could. You need to do that, and do it really, really well.’

“It was like this seminal moment: ‘You need to do something bigger than yourself,’” Luna recalls. “I knew in that moment this is a big deal if you have an opportunity that those like you didn’t have. Sure, if I hadn’t been intrigued, I would have said, ‘Look, I can’t be a sacrificial lamb.’ … But when he said it to me—it pushes you to be your best.”

Luna joined Heller Ehrman in 1997. He credits a couple of mentors there with teaching him the ropes of trial litigation. “John Phillips, I would see the way he handled the court, the way he would talk to the judge and jury and make arguments, the way he put together directs and crosses of witnesses. I was inspired.”
And watching Peter Danelo research a legal problem, Luna says, was like watching a game of three-dimensional chess. “He’d say, ‘OK, if this path doesn’t work, what’s an alternative path? What’s the rule and what resulted in that rule? Does it make sense?’”

Luna soon got his first trial opportunity. “John Phillips asked me if I wanted to try a case. I said ‘yeah,’ and he said, ‘It involves level 3 sex offenders.’ I was like, ‘Ohhh, really?’ I mean, that’s a natural reaction for a lot of people. They have done horrible, horrible things. The question, though, was about their conditions of confinement. And then I thought, ‘Do you really believe in due process rights or not?’ … So I said ‘all right.’”

He went on to obtain numerous forms of relief, including a judgment against the state in the prisoners’ favor.

While at Heller Ehrman, Luna got a call from his former professor Jacqueline McMurtrie and her law students, who were working with the Innocence Project and earned the right to a hearing to potentially overturn the rape conviction of Ted Bradford. They asked Luna to lead it. “The students investigate cases, find witnesses, do briefings—it’s real boots-on-the-ground work,” he says.

The judge agreed to overturn the conviction, but the state appealed, so Luna argued that, too. “Then I thought it would be over,” Luna recalls, “but then the prosecutor put him through a whole new trial. So I tried the criminal case, even though I’m not a criminal lawyer.”

At trial, the prosecution had used Bradford’s 45-minute taped confession, but Luna knew that had followed more than 10 hours of unrecorded questioning. He made the case that seeing only a small portion of the interrogation distorted the confession’s validity. “I asked the jury during selection, ‘If you were buying a house, and you were only allowed to see 10 percent of the house, maybe just the upstairs bathroom or just the kitchen, would you buy it?’ I mean, that’s nutty, right? And in closing, I said, ‘The law says, “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” Nobody in their right mind would buy a house if they could only see 10 percent of it. And they want you to trust a person’s, liberty, their life, on 10 percent of the information?’”

Luna still makes himself available to the Innocence Project, which he believes performs a vital function. “Obviously, we need laws—we need to be protected from [wrongdoers]—but our system is flawed because it’s a human system. The Innocence Project is a critical check; it doesn’t cost society anything. There have been hundreds of exonerees, including dozens of people on death row. And what’s really scary is the number of confirmed innocent people who’ve given false confessions. The upside of this is I think police officers are now getting better training to not do things that lead to false confessions.”

During Luna’s last few years at Heller Ehrman, Wampold pressed him to switch lanes and join PWRFL. Heller Ehrman was primarily a corporate defense firm, and Wampold thought Luna’s gift was on the other side of the aisle. Luna was hesitant. “I think there was a part of him—growing up the way he did, taking on that risk was very scary to him,” says Wampold. “It was easier for me, growing up in a middle-class family. If it didn’t work out, I had a backstop. He didn’t, so I think it was much harder for him to make the leap.”

In the spring of 2007, Luna made up his mind. “You get to that crossroads in life,” he says. “What are you going to be—a plaintiff jury trial lawyer as what defines you, or are you going to do great work and not be a jury trial lawyer? Mike said, ‘We’re jury trial lawyers.’ He’s right.

“I didn’t really choose this—it chose me. I’m lucky enough to live in a society where people can make a living who have the interest and ability at some level to advocate,” Luna says. “When you’re able to make it about somebody else’s needs and interests, it’s actually the best thing.”

In his 18th year at his firm, Luna says PWRFL reminds him of Columbia Terrace in one important way. “Coming here, it’s really like being in your house,” he says. “Everybody knows what everybody’s doing; we know every case in the office. I have been so blessed—I have found community in all the places I’ve been.”

Breaking Good

If you walked through Harvard Square in the early 1980s, you might have caught a glimpse of Luna, Benzan and their buddies hanging out in the infamous plaza known as The Pit.

“We were the kids other people might be worried about,” says Luna, “until we started dancing.” The group, who called themselves The Cosmo Crew, would breakdance while Luna’s brother Wuaca passed the hat. “We laid down cardboard on the bricks, and eventually we made enough money to buy sheets of linoleum instead.”

Benzan recalls that Luna was a pretty good dancer, but Luna demurs. “We would do the kick worm, the crab walk; we would pop,” he says. “Dennis could do the windmill, but I never could.”