Information About Camp Lejeune Administrative Settlements and Offers To Be Reported by U.S. Government

Following court orders issued last month, which indicated that confidential details of Camp Lejeune settlements will no longer be included in regular status reports, a federal magistrate judge has ordered the U.S. government to still provide updates to settlement masters and key parties in the litigation.

The U.S. government faces more than 325,000 Camp Lejeune lawsuits and administrative claims, each seeking financial compensation for various types of cancer and other ailments allegedly caused by toxic chemicals in the Marine base’s water supply between the mid-1950s and late-1980s. Each of the claims were submitted within a two year window provided by the Camp Lejeune Justice Act (CLJA) of 2022, which closed on August 10, 2024.

The massive litigation is currently being overseen by U.S. District Judges Richard E. Myers II, Terrence W. Boyle, Louise W. Flanagan and James C. Dever III, all from the Eastern District of North Carolina, who directed the parties early in the pretrial proceedings to provide regular status reports on Camp Lejeune settlement efforts, including information about individual and global resolutions, since it would take decades to resolve each claim at trial.

In August, the judges clarified that, although the U.S. government has only extended Camp Lejeune offers to a small fraction of claimants, the government did not need to disclose Camp Lejeune settlement information at regular status conferences, which it had been doing since the beginning of the litigation.

However, in a court order (PDF) issued on October 8, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Gates clarified that the settlement information still needs to be provided to key parties in the litigation.

“[O]n the same day that the parties file their joint status report in advance of each of the status conferences required to be held in this litigation, defendant United States of America shall serve by email on the Settlement Masters, the undersigned as Settlement Liaison, and the Plaintiffs’ Leadership Group a notice signed by defendant’s counsel stating the then current number of administrative claims under the Camp Lejeune Justice Act that have been settled and the then current number of outstanding offers to settle such claims,” the order states. “This information had previously been included in the joint status reports.”

Two Camp Lejeune settlement masters were appointed in July 2024, who are working with the parties to resolve the litigation before numerous trials are required.

October 2024 Camp Lejeune Lawsuits Update

While the parties are working to determine if a global Camp Lejeune settlement program can be established, the Court is moving forward with a bellwether process, 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

To help focus efforts, the Court  directed the parties in June 2024 to narrow down the original list of 100 cases 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.

While 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.