© 2017 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden
(Dec. 14) – No one ever has a bad word to say about Chris Luna.
He’s funny, smart, hard working, kind-hearted and beloved. He’s a huge advocate for diversity and community service.
A 1986 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, Luna joined MetroPCS in 2005. When T-Mobile acquired the prepaid wireless service in a $1.5 billion transaction in 2013, Luna was promoted to chief counsel for MetroPCS’ senior management team and the company’s top legal officer in Texas.
“I love my job because no two days are alike,” Luna told The Texas Lawbook in an exclusive interview. “If I was doing the same thing everyday, I would go crazy.”
In his new position, Luna will serve on the MetroPCS senior leadership team, supervise the company’s governmental relations activities and have more management responsibilities.
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. His older brother, Charles Stephen Luna, is a Harvard University law school graduate who has been an environmental lawyer in the corporate legal department at Exxon Mobil for two decades.
“My brother’s claim to fame is that he hired Jack Balagia at Exxon,” he said.
Balagia was a trial lawyer who represented Exxon in several cases and later became the oil giant’s general counsel.
After clerking for U.S. Chief Bankruptcy Judge Robert McGuire, Chris Luna joined the Dallas office of Akin Gump in its corporate restructuring and reorganization practice.
Luna, who is 57, served on the Dallas City Council from 1991 to 1997 and then worked two years as the general counsel at Tri-City Health Centre. He joined MetroPCS in 2005.
“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. He currently has eight different law firms working on multiple matters each.
The MetroPCS legal team in Richardson oversees contracts involving advertising, marketing, retail sales operations and premises liabilities, disputes with customers and all litigation matters related to the T-Mobile subsidiary.
“The biggest legal challenge we face is cybersecurity,” he said. “Companies like ours have secret corporate information, but we also have confidential information of our customers that we must protect.”
Luna serves on the MetroPCS Legal Diversity Task Force and is a member of the company’s Corporate Responsibility Advisory Council. As past president of the Dallas Hispanic Law Foundation, he has strongly advocated for ethnic and gender diversity in the legal profession.
“Diversity numbers at Texas law firms have not changed much over the years, and that is very disappointing,” he said. “Law firms need to do better.”
Luna said that MetroPCS does not currently have a preferred outside counsel list, but “we are talking about developing one now.”
“I have never fired a law firm, but I have stopped using firms because of a lack of communications,” he said. “I hate being sent a document from a lawyer who tells me that it needs to be reviewed immediately because it needs to be filed before the end of that day.”
Luna warns law firms to not bill him for work being done by summer associates.
“As a general rule, I have not been impressed by the legal work of summer associates,” he said.
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