Camp Lejeune Settlement Update Outlines Plans To Resolve Water Contamination Lawsuits by End of 2025

Resolution of the Camp Lejeune lawsuits and administrative claims have moved slowly, but Special Masters appointed by the Court indicate a global settlement could be reached by the end of this year.

According to the Special Masters appointed to oversee settlement talks in Camp Lejeune water contamination lawsuits, a global agreement could be reached by the end of this year to finally resolve the massive litigation involving claims brought by hundreds of thousands of veterans and military family members.

In August 2022, the Camp Lejeune Justice Act (CLJA) was signed into law, providing a two-year filing window for individuals who lived, served or worked on the North Carolina military base from the mid-1950s to late 1980s to seek financial compensation for various types of cancer and other ailments linked to toxic chemicals that contaminated the water supply.

That window closed last summer, and resulted in nearly 500,000 administrative claims and lawsuits being brought, all of which are being overseen by four different judges in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. However, despite an elective settlement option for Camp Lejeune lawsuits announced in September 2023, very few claims have been resolved.

Last July, the four U.S. District Judges overseeing the litigation, Richard E. Myers II, Terrence W. Boyle, Louise W. Flanagan and James C. Dever III, assigned two settlement masters to work with the parties to resolve the litigation.

Late last week, those Special Masters, Thomas J. Perrelli and Christopher G. Oprison, issued a status report (PDF) to provide the Court a Camp Lejeune settlement update, indicating that the parties are on course to reach a global agreement by the end of 2025.

According to the update, the parties have met on a nearly weekly basis since the Special Masters were appointed to engage in Camp Lejeune settlement talks.

“During these meetings, the Parties discussed in depth the development of a settlement path that would seek a resolution of a broad range of cases, including cases that are in the administrative process,” the report states. “(T)he goal would be to start synthesizing the information from the questionnaire, bellwether mediations, and interim legal rulings into a settlement, including a matrix for assigning values to claims and claimants, in the fall of 2025 such that a global settlement and settlement process could be agreed upon and claims administration ready to begin by the end of the year.”

Settling Camp Lejeune lawsuits is critical to avoid the need for hundreds of thousands of individual claims to go forward with bench trials, creating a significant financial and time burden on the Courts and all parties involved.

Camp Lejeune Bellwether Trial Preparations

In the meantime, the Court is moving forward with plans to hold bellwether trials, preparing several “tracks” of claims involving different categories of injuries for early trial dates, which are designed to help gauge how the Court may respond to certain evidence and testimony that is likely to be repeated throughout the litigation.

In October 2023, the Court established a Camp Lejeune Lawsuit Track 1 criteria, and the parties selected a group of 100 cases to go through early discovery involving the following five categories of injuries:

• Bladder cancer
• Kidney cancer
• Leukemia
• Parkinson’s disease
• Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma

The Court then directed the parties to narrow the list to a group of 25 claims that will be eligible for trial, including five cases from each of the five injury categories, with plaintiffs selecting three of the claims and the U.S. government selecting the other two.

Even though the outcome of these early bellwether trials will not have a binding impact on other claims in the litigation, they will be closely watched by lawyers involved in the cases, as the average amounts of any Camp Lejeune lawsuit payouts awarded may help the parties in global settlement negotiations for various types of injuries, if an agreement is not reached by the end of 2025.