Elizabeth A. Fegan

The Claim That Is Not Ready Yet

The three matters all required relief for people whose evidence or injuries could emerge only after settlement.

In each, a substantial number of the people entitled to relief could not prove their claims at the time of settlement — not because the evidence was weak, but because it did not exist yet. A concussion's consequences may surface decades after the last game. A water system's contamination may not be detected until a testing requirement reaches it. A survivor may not be ready to describe what happened, and may never be.

A settlement that pays only the documented claims resolves the defendant's liability to everyone while delivering relief to a fraction. Fegan's work in these cases went to the structures that hold a place for the claim that has not arrived.

Fifty Years of Monitoring

College athletes accumulate concussion risk across practices and games, and symptoms may emerge long after a season ends.

Fegan's national NCAA litigation addressed the association's concussion protocols through a class remedy designed around future medical needs — creating a program for screening, diagnosis, and care after exposure had already accumulated.

She helped shape and present the settlement through judicial review, refining its covered population, its medical-monitoring provisions, and its relationship to individual injury claims.

The completed agreement secured a fifty-year monitoring program, a $70 million Medical Monitoring Fund, a $5 million research fund, and nationwide concussion-protocol reforms. Final approval came in August 2019, and the settlement became effective that November.

The monitoring program is scheduled to continue for fifty years, allowing screening and evaluation as symptoms emerge long after competition.

What the Program Actually Provides

Eligible class members can complete a screening questionnaire and, where indicated, receive in-person medical evaluations at no out-of-pocket cost. The program generally provides up to two evaluations, with a possible third in specified circumstances, through regional locations overseen with input from a medical science committee.

The settlement also required baseline testing, return-to-play policies, concussion reporting and education, and medical best practices.

Two features distinguish it from a damages fund. First, the relief is diagnostic: it tells a former athlete whether something is wrong, which is what most of them actually need and cannot otherwise obtain. Second, it preserved qualifying personal-injury claims — so an athlete whose evaluation reveals serious injury retains the individualized damages proceeding a monitoring program cannot substitute for.

A Harm That Resists Aggregation

The litigation arising from former USC gynecologist George Tyndall demanded an entirely different structure.

Former patients alleged sexual misconduct and organizational failures across many years. The class proceeding concerned a deeply personal form of harm, in which privacy, choice, and the differences among survivors could not be treated as administrative complications to be smoothed away.

Fegan served on the plaintiffs' executive committee and as interim class counsel, helping direct the survivor-centered structure of the litigation. She had also served as lead counsel in the class action brought by survivors against Harvey Weinstein, where the class process likewise had to develop common claims without requiring every woman to recount her experience publicly to participate. In appointing her, the court drew on the assessment of a federal judge who had overseen her NCAA work and had found her astute, hard-working, and — most important in the circumstance — fair and level-headed.

She helped review university and medical records, interview hundreds of women, and develop expert evidence concerning what USC knew and how it responded. That common record supported a settlement structure in which baseline compensation did not require every survivor to prove an individual claim through public litigation.

Paths, Not a Form

The completed settlement established a $215 million non-reversionary cash fund. Attorney fees and expenses were paid separately and did not reduce it.

The allocation process offered several routes, with payments ranging from $2,500 to $250,000. The baseline amount was available without any detailed submission at all, and higher levels were available for survivors who elected to provide additional information through a confidential process.

The tiered structure let each survivor decide how much information to provide while preserving a baseline payment for those who declined a detailed submission.

Money was one part of the relief. The agreement also established an independent women's health advocate, oversight and reporting mechanisms, and measures directed at clinical standards, consent, complaints, and prevention — enforceable duties capable of protecting patients and of being evaluated after the settlement took effect.

Forever Chemicals

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances were engineered not to break down. That property made them useful in firefighting foams, coatings, and industrial applications, and it is also why they persist in soil, in groundwater, and in the human body long after their use ends.

For a public water system, the practical consequence is that contamination is not an event to be cleaned up but a condition to be managed — through testing, treatment technology, and capital investment paid for by ratepayers.

Thousands of public water systems had detected certain PFAS compounds, or faced testing that could reveal them later. Plaintiffs alleged that 3M had known of the risks and failed to warn.

In March 2024, the federal court entered final approval of a nationwide class settlement valued between $10.5 billion and $12.5 billion for roughly 12,000 public water systems. As appointed class counsel, Fegan helped design funding for testing and treatment-related claims across systems with different sampling histories, infrastructure needs, and future detection dates.

Fifty-Five and Forty-Five

The settlement divided eligible systems into two phases.

Phase One covered systems with qualifying PFAS detections. Phase Two addressed systems required to test later, or whose status had not yet been established.

Fifty-five percent of the fund was allocated to Phase One, and forty-five percent to Phase Two.

Phase One's fifty-five percent funded systems with qualifying detections; Phase Two's forty-five percent reserved money for systems whose qualifying evidence would arrive later through required testing.

Fegan represented Phase Two claimants and pressed for treatment comparable to systems that already had detections. Her Phase Two work focused on keeping later-tested systems within a funded allocation, with money reserved before their qualifying results arrived.

Phase Two also carried the remedy into administration after final approval. Testing schedules, notice, registration, and claims deadlines gave later-tested systems a defined route into the fund, linking future sampling results to compensation already reserved for them — so that a small utility's eventual detection meets money that is waiting rather than a closed program.

Public Water Systems in PVC Antitrust Litigation

In June 2025, a federal court in Chicago appointed FeganScott co-lead class counsel for the end users in nationwide antitrust litigation concerning PVC pipe — a class that includes public water systems purchasing the pipe that carries the water the 3M settlement is treating.

The 3M matter addresses PFAS contamination and treatment costs; the PVC case addresses the price of pipe purchased by end users, including public water systems. In both matters, Fegan represents classes that include public utilities.

Two Pounds of Propane

The propane matter concerned a concealed change in an ordinary retail purchase.

As co-lead counsel in nationwide litigation over pre-filled propane exchange tanks, she prosecuted price-fixing claims against the two manufacturers who dominated the market. The companies reduced the amount of propane in the standard tank from seventeen pounds to fifteen while holding the price, an alleged coordinated increase that was not apparent from the unchanged tank. The case produced a $35 million common fund.

The Night Before Trial

In antitrust litigation over the heartburn drug Nexium, Fegan was appointed to the lead trial team after class certification, representing Massachusetts payors who alleged that the price of the drug had been kept artificially high.

The case settled for $20 million the night before trial.

The settlement followed full trial preparation. The lead trial team had completed the work required to carry the certified class claim to the eve of opening statements.

The App That Watched Back

In 2022, Fegan served as lead counsel in nationwide litigation against TikTok and secured final approval of a $92 million settlement resolving claims that the app violated federal law and the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act by collecting users' biometric identifiers and private data and disclosing that information to third parties without notice or consent.

The class members generally did not know what had been collected; the alleged conduct was documented in the defendant's systems rather than the plaintiffs' memories; and settlement notice and administration had to reach millions of people who would not have discovered the claim on their own.

Before the Firm

Fegan earned her law degree from Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where she served as editor-at-large of the Loyola Law Journal and later returned to teach legal writing.

As an associate at Shefsky & Froelich in Chicago, she served in special local-government appointments — special assistant corporation counsel to the City of Chicago, the Chicago Park District, and the Public Building Commission — and worked on special-master teams in federal and state court, seeing complex litigation from the side that administers it. She then built her plaintiffs' practice as a partner at The Wexler Firm before launching the Chicago office of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, which she led as founding managing partner for fifteen years.

Building a Plaintiff-Side Practice

Fegan founded FeganScott with Timothy Scott in 2019 and serves as its managing member.

Her plaintiff-side practice includes consumer, antitrust, discrimination, sexual-abuse, product-liability, privacy, sports, and PFAS matters. Her class work addresses common organizational conduct in those fields while preserving individual claimants' different evidence and remedies.