Dara Hegar

Twelve States in One Courtroom

The plaintiffs in Ingham alleged that decades of daily use of Johnson's Baby Powder and Shower to Shower had exposed them to asbestos and caused their ovarian cancer.

Trying twenty-two claims together creates a particular appellate vulnerability, and it has little to do with the science. The defense can argue afterward that the jury blurred the plaintiffs together, that the strongest case carried the weakest, and that no juror could have made twenty-two separate causation findings across six weeks of testimony.

Hegar's team built a record in which each plaintiff's individual proof was visible on its face.

Hegar coordinated documents, witnesses, examination materials, legal issues, and trial teams around the common scientific and corporate proof, while keeping each woman's product use, medical history, competing risk factors, diagnosis, treatment, causation, and damages evidence distinct.

The common record addressed talc sources, product testing, manufacture, warnings, corporate knowledge, and scientific causation. That shared proof — where the talc was mined, what the testing showed, who inside the company knew what — established the general case once, for everyone. It could not establish any individual case. That work had to be done twenty-two separate times, and it had to be done in a way a reviewing court could later see.

Thirty Witnesses, Twenty-Two Differential Diagnoses

More than thirty witnesses testified.

A medical expert performed a separate differential diagnosis for every plaintiff: twenty-two individual analyses, each identifying the plausible causes of that woman's ovarian cancer and each explaining why the others were ruled out. Differential diagnosis is the physician's ordinary reasoning process, but performing it twenty-two times on the stand, under cross-examination, is a distinct undertaking. Every plaintiff had her own age at diagnosis, her own family history, her own reproductive and medical background, her own decades of product use, and her own alternative explanations for the defense to press.

The court then spent more than 140 transcript pages reading plaintiff-specific verdict directors and governing law — the instructions telling the jury what it had to find for each woman, under the law of her own state.

Those 140 pages were the structural spine of the case. They are what converted a joint proceeding into twenty-two adjudications occurring in the same room.

The jury found the defendants liable.

What the Court of Appeals Found in the Record

On appeal, the Missouri Court of Appeals rejected the contention that the joint trial had obscured individual causation. It relied on precisely the material the trial team had built for that purpose: the separate instructions, and the specific-causation testimony given for each woman.

The court also upheld Missouri jurisdiction over the consumer subsidiary as to fifteen nonresident plaintiffs, on the ground that the Shower to Shower product had been manufactured, labeled, and packaged through a Missouri operation — a holding that tied the forum to the physical facts of how the product came into being rather than to where each plaintiff happened to live.

The appellate judgment entered $500 million in compensatory damages against the consumer subsidiary, with the parent jointly responsible for $125 million of that amount, plus $900 million in punitive damages against the subsidiary and $715,909,091 against the parent. Accounting for overlapping corporate responsibility, the final enforceable judgment totaled approximately $2.116 billion and preserved relief for twenty women and families.

The Missouri Supreme Court declined further review. The United States Supreme Court denied certiorari on June 1, 2021, leaving the judgment intact. The separate instructions and plaintiff-specific causation record supported a judgment that survived each stage of review.

Fifteen, Seventy, Fifteen

Hegar's other principal work took the opposite form. Instead of one trial resolving twenty-two claims, it was a negotiation resolving claims brought by public entities across an entire state.

She represented Tarrant County and served in the leadership structure coordinating opioid claims brought by Texas counties, cities, hospital districts, and other public entities. The executed Janssen Texas term sheet named her among the lawyers authorized to represent the Texas Plaintiffs' Steering Committee on the statewide negotiating committee.

The framework divided settlement proceeds three ways: fifteen percent directly to counties and municipalities, seventy percent to the Texas Opioid Abatement Fund for regional and statewide remediation, and fifteen percent to the state through the Attorney General.

Local governments received a direct share for the public-safety, health, and social-service costs they had already absorbed — the jail beds, the ambulance runs, the child-welfare caseloads. The state retained responsibility for statewide programs. And the largest share, seventy percent, was dedicated to prevention, treatment, recovery, harm reduction, and the regions carrying the greatest burden.

That allocation was designed to keep the largest share of the proceeds tied to specified abatement uses rather than unrestricted general spending. A dedicated abatement fund with defined permissible uses connects the money to prevention, treatment, recovery, harm reduction, and other approved opioid-response purposes long after the negotiation has closed.

Hegar helped coordinate participation, releases, regional needs, local-government shares, hospital funding, administration, and approved abatement uses.

The Janssen agreement placed approximately $268.38 million into Texas's allocation structure. A broader package announced in 2022 combined Johnson & Johnson and the major distributors for approximately $1.85 billion in Texas, including $1.167 billion from the three distributors.

What the Money Has Done Since

The political-subdivision share has produced recurring payments: approximately $47.1 million in March 2023, $9.2 million in April 2024, $44.8 million in April 2025, and $11.5 million in March 2026.

Hospital districts received $65.8 million in August 2024, $14.3 million in April 2025, and $11.8 million in April 2026 under the abatement structure. Recipients report on the use of funds for opioid-related needs.

In June 2026, the Texas Opioid Abatement Fund Council awarded eighty long-term community grants totaling $48.9 million across the state's twenty Regional Healthcare Partnerships, for treatment, care coordination, and recovery support.

The recurring distributions show how the agreement continues to operate after execution. Its value depends on the agencies and local recipients that administer and report the funds, with payments continuing to reach county budgets and treatment programs across Texas.

The Pharmacy Counter

Hegar's opioid work also reached a jury. She was part of the national trial team in the bellwether trial brought by Lake and Trumbull Counties in the opioid multidistrict litigation — the first case in the country to put retail pharmacy chains before a jury for their role in the epidemic.

In November 2021, the jury found that pharmacies operated by Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens had substantially contributed to a public nuisance in the two Ohio counties by dispensing opioids without the controls that would have curtailed their staggering flow. The court subsequently ordered the chains to fund abatement of $650.6 million.

The verdict extended opioid accountability to retail pharmacy conduct. Together with the Texas negotiations, the case placed Hegar in both a jury trial addressing responsibility and settlement work directing funds to treatment and abatement.

The Storyboard

Hegar, a Houston native, entered private practice after serving as briefing attorney to Justice Richard H. Edelman on the Fourteenth Court of Appeals.

Shortly after joining The Lanier Law Firm in 1999, she worked on an eight-week environmental trial involving alleged benzene contamination from an oil-well blowout, built on a record of hundreds of depositions, scientific materials, and witnesses.

She later served as second chair in the first Vioxx trial, coordinating documents, examination materials, legal issues, and the lawyers assigned to separate parts of the case.

For that presentation, the team arranged photographs and records as a storyboard rather than a list of bullet points. The sequence linked a person, a product, a decision, a warning, a medical event, and a consequence — each panel following from the one before it — while Hegar coordinated the documents, legal issues, and examination materials used by the separate trial teams.

Unlike an outline, the storyboard showed the sequence in which events occurred and made the asserted causal chain visible across six weeks of testimony. Hegar later applied the same organizational discipline to the 140 pages of plaintiff-specific instructions in Ingham.

Nine Hundred Files, Three Offices

By 2013, Hegar had managed nearly one thousand asbestos cases and several trial teams. By 2015, she had become firmwide managing attorney, coordinating lawyers and litigation across the firm's Houston, New York, and Los Angeles offices and working with the firm's founder on his trials.

Firmwide coordination at that scale requires common discovery, local counsel, client communication, expert development, trial calendars, appellate preservation, and settlement administration — all while keeping each client's record distinct within the larger proceedings.

At docket scale, shared work can be performed once while each client's record remains distinct.

Her practice includes product liability, pharmaceuticals, asbestos, toxic exposure, business litigation, and public-entity mass torts.

Background

Hegar earned her political-science degree with honors from Texas A&M University, where she now serves on the Board of Directors of The Association of Former Students, and completed a master's degree in international relations and her law degree at St. Mary's University, where she served as an associate editor of the law journal.

Her appellate clerkship gave her early experience with the records reviewing courts examine. Her later work, from the Vioxx storyboard and the Ingham instructions to the Texas abatement fund, has required records organized for juries, courts, public entities, and administrators.