© 2018 The Texas Lawbook.
Finalist: Legal Dept. of the Year for Diversity
By Mark Curriden
(Jan. 15) – Chris Luna was a law student attending a law firm reception when the wife of a partner turned to him, handed him her glass and asked for more wine.
“Because I looked more like the hired help than a second-year law student that the firm was recruiting, the woman thought I was a waiter,” Luna says. “The partner got very embarrassed, even though it wasn’t his fault.
“There were so few lawyers of color back then,” he says. “While there are many more of us today, the number of minority corporate lawyers remains woefully low.”
Three decades later, Luna is the chief counsel and vice president of MetroPCS and one of the most respected business lawyers in North Texas. He is also an outspoken advocate for diversity.
Luna is also a finalist for the Outstanding Corporate Counsel’s Diversity of the Year Award from the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook. The finalist will be honored and the winners unveiled at the awards event on Jan. 25.
Born and raised in Houston, Luna is the second youngest of eight children. His father was an oil and gas engineer. His mother was a nurse. They were first-generation Mexican-Americans who taught their kids that education was the key to their success.
As a teenager, Luna listened to stories from his older brother, Charles Stephen Luna, who was a Harvard University Law School graduate who joined the Exxon Mobil corporate legal department as an environmental lawyer.
“My brother would tell law stories, and I would sit and listen and be fascinated,” he says.
Luna received an accounting degree from the University of Texas. He received his law degree from UT in 1986.
After clerking for U.S. Chief Bankruptcy Judge Robert McGuire, Luna joined the Dallas office of Akin Gump in its corporate restructuring and reorganization practice.
In 1991, Luna decided to run for a seat on the Dallas City Council.
“The common wisdom was that I was going to lose the election, but I won by 171 votes,” he says. “My colleagues called me ‘Landslide Luna.’”
The city council later elected Luna to be the city’s first Hispanic deputy mayor pro tem. He served on the Parkland Health & Hospital System’s board of managers and currently has a seat on the board of the Garland Housing Finance Corporation.
In 2005, he joined MetroPCS and was promoted to chief counsel in 2013 when T-Mobile acquired the prepaid wireless service in a $1.5 billion transaction.
“In the four years since the T-Mobile deal, MetroPCS has more than doubled our customers, more than doubled the number of our retail locations and the number of markets we serve has gone from 17 to 84,” he said. “The job has grown because the company has grown.”
Luna leads a legal team of three in-house lawyers and three outside counsel who basically work full time for MetroPCS.
Diversity plays a significant factor in his decision to hire outside counsel, he says.
“Law firm diversity initiatives are great, but many law firm leaders have mastered the talk but do not walk the walk,” he says. “The aggregate number of minority lawyers has gotten a little better, but the percentage of lawyers of color has not improved.
“In fact, we have actually seen a regression in recent years.”
Luna is actively involved in several community efforts aimed to increase diversity with a focus on populating the pipeline. He serves on the MetroPCS Legal Diversity Task Force and is a member of the company’s Corporate Responsibility Advisory Council. He also is a senior leader of the Dallas Hispanic Law Foundation and aggressively raises funds for minority scholarships.
Nor is Luna shy about using his leadership position at MetroPCS to promote diversity. He says he has stopped using law firms that do not take diversity seriously.
“Corporate legal departments need to hold accountable the law firms they hire,” he says. “I’m a firm believer that we need to use carrots and sticks to push law firms to be more aggressive about diversity.
“My mother used to say that ‘we should be givers, not takers.’ That was right back then and it is right today,” he says.
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