Gary J. Douglas

The Science Panel

A 2005 class settlement created something unusual: the C8 Science Panel, three independent epidemiologists who studied health information and blood samples from tens of thousands of residents whose taps had carried the chemical. It became a large human-exposure study.

The panel found probable links between C8 exposure and six conditions — kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, and pregnancy-induced hypertension, including preeclampsia. Under the settlement framework, residents with those conditions could pursue individual claims without relitigating whether C8 was capable of causing the listed disease across the exposed population. The finding split the science into two halves. The population question was answered. What remained, for every sick person in the valley, was the individual one: this water, this body, this diagnosis. That was the half that had to be won in a courtroom.

Three Juries, Three Verdicts

Douglas served as lead or co-lead trial counsel in the first three bellwether trials selected from the federal multidistrict litigation in Columbus, Ohio. Each ended in a plaintiff’s verdict.

Carla Bartlett developed kidney cancer after years of drinking water supplied in the contaminated region. In October 2015, jurors awarded her $1.6 million — the first PFAS trial verdict in history.

David Freeman developed testicular cancer. After a five-week trial, the jury awarded $5.1 million in compensatory damages, found that DuPont had acted with malice, and added $500,000 in punitive damages. In the punitive phase, Douglas asked the jurors to picture the figure of Lady Justice — they had already balanced her scales in the first phase of the trial, he told them; now they held her sword.

Kenneth Vigneron Sr. also developed testicular cancer after years of drinking from affected Ohio systems. In December 2016, the jury awarded $2 million in compensatory damages and $10.5 million in punitive damages — $12.5 million, the largest verdict in the litigation.

The trials were built the way the valley’s story demanded: water-system sampling that reconstructed concentrations by district and by year, residence records that identified who drank the water and when, blood studies and medical records that tied each diagnosis to years of exposure, and DuPont’s own documents showing what the company knew at Washington Works while the river carried its chemistry downstream. Douglas’s closing imperative — make them own it — was the whole architecture of the case in four words.

In 2017, DuPont and Chemours agreed to resolve approximately 3,500 C8 personal-injury claims for $670.7 million. The story of the litigation reached far beyond the valley: it became the Hollywood film Dark Waters, the book Exposure, and the documentaries The Devil We Know and How to Poison a Planet.

The Foam

The next chapter of PFAS was engineered to spread. Aqueous film-forming foam — AFFF — was designed to smother fuel fires, and it was sprayed for decades at airports, military bases, and fire-training grounds, where its PFAS load soaked into soil and groundwater and migrated toward municipal wells. Douglas has described firefighting foam as an unusually effective delivery device for PFAS. Public water providers across the country faced testing, treatment, filtration, and long-term operating costs for contamination they had not caused.

The federal cases were centralized in Charleston, South Carolina. The City of Stuart, Florida, was selected as the first public-water bellwether, and Douglas served as lead trial counsel. His team assembled 3M’s PFAS history, expert science, the city’s wells and testing dates, contamination levels, treatment design, engineering costs, company documents, and witnesses — a trial-ready record for a case the industry had never before had to face in front of a jury.

On the morning trial was set to begin, the proceeding was adjourned while national agreements took form. 3M agreed to pay between $10.5 billion and $12.5 billion to eligible public water systems — a nationwide drinking-water contamination settlement. DuPont-related companies reached a separate $1.185 billion agreement. U.S. District Judge Richard M. Gergel granted final approval to the DuPont settlement in February 2024 and the 3M settlement in March 2024.

The agreements created a claims process keyed to what water systems actually face: PFAS levels, treatment needs, sampling, treatment design and construction, filtration, replacement media, and laboratory work. The national numbers connect, system by system, to the pumps and filters that deliver drinking water.

A Career of Firsts

Douglas is a founding partner of Douglas & London in New York. His practice also includes dangerous-drug, personal-injury, medical-malpractice, and other product-liability matters, including earlier litigation involving a surgical stapler. His career runs on firsts: the first win in the nation against the automobile industry for a defective airbag that killed a six-year-old boy; the first plaintiff’s victory in New York history against the tobacco industry; back-to-back verdicts against Johnson & Johnson in a medical-device case and Merck over the osteoporosis drug Fosamax; and the first three PFAS trial wins ever recorded, followed by lead trial counsel’s chair in the first AFFF public-water bellwether.

He has been invited to speak about PFAS at law schools across the country, before multiple state legislatures, and before governing bodies overseas, including the Italian Senate and the European Parliament.

He earned a B.S. from the State University of New York at Albany and a J.D. from the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center at Touro College, and is admitted in New York. And when the courtroom empties, he picks up a guitar: Douglas fronts a touring rock ’n’ roll band and has shared stages with Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.