Hunter J. Shkolnik

In the week of October 14, 2019, a jury of twelve was seated in federal court in Cleveland for the first bellwether trial of the national prescription-opioid litigation. On Friday, October 18, 2019, settlement talks mediated by U.S. District Judge Dan Aaron Polster failed, and drug-industry chief executives and the attorneys general of four states spent the day in the city without closing a national deal reported to be worth up to $48 billion. The talks over the two Ohio counties whose cases were set for trial started again on Sunday, said Hunter J. Shkolnik, Cuyahoga County’s lead trial lawyer. In the plaintiffs’ war room at Post Office Plaza, the lawyers went on preparing for opening statements past midnight, because no one knew whether Walgreens would settle too. Shortly after midnight, four of the defendants agreed to terms. Walgreens did not.

When the deal was announced that Monday, October 21, opening statements were hours away. McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, and Teva agreed to pay $260 million to Cuyahoga and Summit counties. The three distributors would pay $215 million in cash; Teva would pay $20 million in cash and provide $25 million worth of addiction-treatment drugs. Cuyahoga would take 62 percent and Summit 38 percent. Had the counties gone to trial and been awarded everything they sought, the companies could have owed more than $8 billion. In court that Monday, Polster thanked the lawyers on both sides and said that “this would have been a very, very interesting trial to preside over.” He wanted the broader talks to continue so that those involved “don’t lose the momentum that was created.”

For the two counties, the settlement also meant turning down a potential national settlement that would have resolved thousands of lawsuits, and Shkolnik, a partner at Napoli Shkolnik, explained Cuyahoga’s choice that day. “They were talking billions of dollars paid in trickles,” he said. “Not even enough startup money to help any one county start its program, and that’s why we couldn’t recommend to the county that that was a good deal for the county or anyone else. And we had to stand alone and say no to the national settlement, and now they have to come back to the table to fix that. We need money upfront for all the cities and all the counties, and then you pay out more money over time.” “People can’t lose sight of the fact that the counties got a very good deal for themselves,” he said, “but we also set an important national benchmark for the others.”

“Had we gone to trial, even if we had won more money, it probably would have been five, ten years before we saw that money because of appeals,” said Armond Budish, the Cuyahoga County executive. “We understand how the process works. We need the money on the streets, helping people today. That’s what this settlement does.” Don Migliori, a lawyer for Summit County, described the mood in the plaintiffs’ war room as “a little giddy.”

Travis Bornstein had been preparing to testify at the trial. His son, Tyler, became hooked on opioids as a teenager after he was given a prescription following surgery on his arm, and he died of a heroin overdose in 2014, five years later, while he was on a waiting list; Bornstein said better-funded treatment might have helped him. “There’s no amount of money that’s going to change the devastation and destruction,” he said.

On Track to Lose Almost 800 People

Cuyahoga County had sued in October 2017, in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, naming manufacturers including Purdue Pharma, Teva, Cephalon, and Janssen, the distributors McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen, and four individuals, and seeking to recover what the county had spent on health care, law enforcement, and social services. Napoli Shkolnik led the case, with Plevin & Gallucci and the county’s law department as local counsel. Forty-six people in the county had died of overdoses in January 2017, and Budish said the county was on track to lose almost 800 that year; in 2016, he said, the epidemic had killed more people there than homicides, suicides, and auto accidents combined. The medical examiner’s office had asked for $200,000 more and was hiring pathologists because caseloads exceeded the limits set by the National Association of Medical Examiners, and more than 2,000 children were in the county’s foster care, the most since 2011. “This is an emergency,” Budish said. Michael C. O’Malley, the county prosecutor, called the companies “drug pushers on a national level.” The county lost 729 people to overdoses in 2017, the worst year of the crisis there.

Polster had appointed Shkolnik to the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee of In re National Prescription Opiate Litigation, MDL 2804, in January 2018. In 2024 Shkolnik described the decision to take on the opioid cases: “We bet the ranch to go into that because we knew it was right. It was something that had to be dealt with, and people laughed at us and we did it.”

Polster’s first case-management order, entered in April 2018, designated three cases to be tried first as Track One, among them County of Cuyahoga v. Purdue Pharma L.P., No. 17-OP-45004, and set the trial for March 18, 2019. The trial was later set to open on October 21, 2019. On September 3, 2019, Polster ruled on the defendants’ motions for summary judgment on causation.

Aggregate Proof and Foreseeable Diversion

The manufacturers argued that the counties could not show that their marketing had caused medically unnecessary or excess prescriptions in the two counties, or that the excess prescriptions had caused the counties’ harms. The distributors and pharmacies argued that the counties had not shown that their injuries resulted from the diversion of suspicious orders, as opposed to an increase in prescriptions written in good faith after the manufacturers’ marketing, and that diversion was intervening criminal conduct.

The counties answered with expert evidence. Meredith Rosenthal, a health economist, concluded that the manufacturers’ combined promotion of prescription opioids since 1995 was a substantial contributing factor in the increased use of those drugs in the Track One counties. Jonathan Gruber, also a health economist, showed that national shipments of prescription opioids rose by more than 500 percent from 1997 to 2016. David Cutler, an expert in health and public economics, analyzed how the shipments caused harm in the two counties, and Katherine Keyes, an epidemiologist, reviewed dozens of studies and concluded that increases in prescription opioids are causally related to increases in opioid-related harms.

Polster denied the motions. He found the counties’ aggregate proof of causation “sufficient to overcome summary judgment” and rejected the distributors’ argument that the claims failed as a matter of law because diversion involves intervening criminal conduct, holding that “a jury could reasonably conclude diversion is a foreseeable consequence of the alleged misconduct.” The extent of the harm caused by the distributors’ alleged wrongdoing, he wrote, involved questions of material fact for the jury.

The same day, denying a manufacturer’s motion, Polster restated what he had already held the Controlled Substances Act required of companies registered to make or distribute the drugs: to “design and operate a system to disclose to the registrant any suspicious orders,” to tell the Drug Enforcement Administration about those orders, and to not ship a suspicious order “unless due diligence reasonably dispels the suspicion.” The plaintiffs, he wrote, “need not identify specific orders that Defendants should not have shipped.”

On September 24 he ruled that the jury deciding the counties’ federal racketeering, Ohio Corrupt Practices Act, and civil-conspiracy claims would also decide public-nuisance liability, and that the court would then try any equitable remedy, bound by the jury’s findings. Two last requests went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Ohio’s attorney general, Dave Yost, asked it to block the trial, arguing that only the state had authority to bring such suits; the distributors and pharmacies asked it to remove Polster over pro-settlement statements he had made in court and to reporters. On October 10 two panels refused both. Despite notice that the counties’ claims were headed for trial, one panel wrote, Ohio had “made no attempt to intervene”; the other said of Polster’s remarks, “we must take his statements in context.” “Cuyahoga County is very pleased to see that both writs were denied and now we can focus our attention to the trial and holding the pharmaceutical industry responsible for the opioid epidemic,” Shkolnik said. The four companies settled seven weeks after the causation ruling.

Fourteen Million Dollars Over Eighteen Years

By Shkolnik’s count, the national proposal the counties had turned down would have brought Cuyahoga County about $14 million, maybe $21 million, over eighteen years. Yost called that proposal “a pile of lumber.” Shkolnik said the county’s own settlement would go entirely to treatment. “It’s going to help the people of Cuyahoga County today, not drips of money that’s going to do nothing over 18 years,” he said, and he compared the work to the tobacco cases: “It takes an army to take on the pharmaceutical industry the same way it did for lawyers who successfully took on tobacco.”

The county had not yet said how it would spend this settlement. Earlier that month it had released a plan for money from its previous opioid settlements: nearly $5.5 million to its Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services board to add residential treatment beds; approximately $3.5 million to Children and Family Services to help mothers and newborns with chemical dependency; about $2 million to St. Vincent’s Rosary Hall; $2.7 million to MetroHealth to treat addicted inmates at the county jail and create a federally licensed treatment program; and additional money for hospital emergency rooms. “It seems like it’s certainly on the right path,” said Sheryl Hirsh, whose daughter Melissa Koppel died of an overdose in 2013 at twenty-three. “I am anxious to see where the money goes.”

By the summer of 2025, Cuyahoga County had received $121 million from its opioid settlements and had spent or committed about $81 million from its opioid mitigation fund. About $32 million paid for a diversion center at 1804 East 55th Street in Cleveland, budgeted from 2020 through 2026, where Oriana House ran the daily operations, FrontLine Service screened calls, and the ADAMHS Board trained police in crisis intervention. Stella Maris, a nonprofit that offers medical detox, received $5.4 million and added 32 residential treatment beds, and $5.5 million more to buy a property for recovery housing. The START program in the county’s Division of Children and Family Services, which supports pregnant mothers and newborns who test positive for drugs, received $6.7 million, and MetroHealth received about $2.6 million for addiction services in the county jail, including a methadone program. County Executive Chris Ronayne announced $3.5 million for a program pairing mental-health workers with first responders and $7 million to build a behavioral crisis center in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood. In 2024 the county’s overdose deaths fell to an eight-year low.

Suboxone at List Price

In the fall of 2019, as Teva sought a nationwide settlement together with Johnson & Johnson and the three largest U.S. drug distributors, it proposed to contribute donated medicine: a generic version of Suboxone, the addiction treatment that combines buprenorphine and the opioid-reversal agent naloxone. Teva valued the donation at the drug’s list price, which did not account for the significant discounts the company routinely gave. Drug-pricing consultants and industry analysts estimated that, measured by the cost of manufacture, the medicine could be worth as little as $1.5 billion.

Shkolnik said the deal was “overvalued to make the settlement look better.” “I don’t believe a no-cash payment from Teva, one of the largest generic manufacturers in the world, is appropriate,” he said.

A First Trial Within a Year

“I come from a family of doctors, and I was clearly supposed to go to medical school,” Shkolnik said in 2024. He graduated cum laude from the University of Massachusetts, took his law degree at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and was admitted to the New York bar in 1986.

While in law school he took a job as a file clerk at a plaintiffs’ firm, putting mail into the files and delivering it to the lawyers. One day he heard the senior partner screaming in his office, with a number of expletives, for someone to get something done right away. Shkolnik went in and said he could do it. The partner told him he was the mail clerk but to go get it done, and Shkolnik became his right hand—“the lawyer son he never had,” as Shkolnik puts it. He stayed at the firm for a few months after law school. When the senior partner, his mentor, died in a plane crash, Shkolnik left for a defense firm.

The firm was Rivkin Radler, then a couple hundred lawyers, and his one requirement was that it make him a trial lawyer. He was promised his first trial within a year of starting. Anthony Maturo, the managing partner of the medical-malpractice department, made that promise and kept it, and Shkolnik won the case. He spent almost five and a half years at the firm as a defense trial lawyer. When it offered him what he describes as the youngest partnership it had ever offered anyone, he saw himself becoming fungible middle management at a bank, going nowhere, and he quit to become a plaintiff’s lawyer.

On the plaintiffs’ side he joined the New York City firm of Paul Rheingold, who had a large pharmaceutical mass-tort practice. A few months later, while Rheingold was away as a resident scholar at the RAND Institute, the firm took on as clients two of the women from the Mayo Clinic’s fen-phen study. Both had taken the diet drug and developed valve disease. “I didn’t know what a mass tort was, I didn’t care what a mass tort was, but I saw two really good cases,” Shkolnik said. When the drug was recalled the calls kept coming, and his response, as he tells it, was to “sign up 3,000 cases.” The New York state judge overseeing the litigation, before whom he had tried many cases, appointed him a co-lead counsel.

“Number one, be honest. Number two, you better prepare more than your adversary,” he said in 2025. “You’ve got to be honest with that jury. You damn well better be honest with the judge.” He prepared for cross-examination by reading the documents and deposition transcripts over and over. “Once the cross-examination started, I’d almost see the words in the document in my head,” he said. “I would see the words on the deposition transcript as I’m crossing the witness, and they try to say something different.” In 2024 he compared trial with gambling: “I don’t go to Vegas and put money on tables. I can walk through a casino and never lose a penny. But I go into courtrooms and I let millions of dollars, in these days billions of dollars, ride.” He went on: “And I just say we’re gonna let it ride today. And we’re doing that because big companies should be required to take care of the mistakes they’ve made, the messes they’ve made, and the people we represent should get compensated.”

Judgment Day in Suffolk County

Napoli Shkolnik had begun Nassau County’s case in 2017. By March 2020 it was set for trial in State Supreme Court in Suffolk County together with the cases of Suffolk County and the State of New York, and several drug companies asked a New York appeals court to delay the March 20 trial date. The court refused. Moving the trial, Shkolnik said, would have been a “monumental disaster”; he called the request a “last-ditch effort” and said the defendants “will all have to meet their Judgment Day before a jury in Suffolk County.” Salvatore Badala, his partner on Nassau’s case, said the plaintiffs were ready to proceed.

The trial opened fifteen months later, in June 2021, in state Supreme Court in Suffolk County, before Justice Jerry Garguilo, with the State of New York and Suffolk and Nassau counties presenting their cases together. Shkolnik represented Nassau County, whose action was County of Nassau v. Purdue Pharma L.P., No. 400008/2017, and served as co-lead counsel with Jayne Conroy of Simmons Hanly Conroy, who represented Suffolk. In the last days before it opened, Walmart, CVS, and Rite Aid were severed from the trial. “Judgment day is coming,” Shkolnik said.

The courtroom was a law school auditorium in Central Islip. In his opening statement for Nassau, Shkolnik told the jurors that the epidemic was the product of a “calculated decision” to profit from a drug the companies knew was addictive, and he previewed the experts and the companies’ own internal communications they would see. “Something happened in these board rooms,” he said, and he told the jurors what he said the companies had decided there: “We can make billions of dollars on this and we can make it quick.” Nancy Patterson of Morgan Lewis, opening for Teva, said there was no evidence that doctors had been duped by the companies’ marketing, and she blamed the state. “The State of New York, always, always, had more information than any defendant about opioid prescriptions and opioid shipments into the state of New York,” she said. “The evidence will show that the state just didn’t do anything with it.”

Actiq, Fentora, and Window-Dressing Systems

More than 30 companies had been named as defendants. Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay $230 million days before the trial began, three major distributors settled in July for more than $1 billion combined, and Allergan agreed to a $200 million settlement just before closing arguments began. That left Teva, a handful of its associated companies, and Anda, a Teva subsidiary that distributes to pharmacies.

The case against Teva centered on Actiq and Fentora, brand-name fentanyl drugs approved for some cancer patients and made by Cephalon, which Teva bought in 2011, and on the generic opioids Teva sold. The plaintiffs alleged that Teva repeatedly promoted the fentanyl drugs for other types of pain in a “deceptive and dangerous marketing strategy.” Lawyers for the two counties and the state showed the jury videos made for a company’s internal sales conference, in which executives spoofed film scenes. In one, an executive speaking in the voice of Dr. Evil from Austin Powers discussed pushing doctors to prescribe the company’s opioid over a competitor’s. In another, a vice president of sales, spliced into a scene from A Few Good Men, explained that sales representatives had quotas: “Quotas have to be exceeded.” Harvey Bartle IV, a lawyer for Teva, said the videos were parodies, intended to be humorous.

On the morning of Monday, December 13, 2021, Shkolnik spent about two hours on Nassau’s closing argument. He argued that the drugmakers left in the case, all affiliated with Teva, had sold opioids without adequate systems for selling them lawfully. “Actavis Watson, Teva, Cephalon, no systems whatever,” he said. “They made the market, they sold the opioids, but had no system to comply with the law.” He dismissed the controls the companies did have: “Every one of them, they had window-dressing systems that didn’t work.”

On December 30, 2021, after more than eight days of deliberation, the jury found Teva and Anda liable under New York public-nuisance law for helping to fuel the opioid crisis. Garguilo called the trial “an ultramarathon.” What Teva would pay was left for a separate phase.

Teva said after the verdict that the plaintiffs had presented no evidence of medically unnecessary prescriptions, of suspicious or diverted orders, or of oversupply, had given no indication of what volumes were appropriate, and had shown no causal relationship between Teva’s conduct, including its marketing, and any harm to the public in the state. “They try to say they’re selling legal products. The only problem is: They’re selling them illegally,” Shkolnik said at a virtual news conference that day. “The jury saw that what they’re doing is wrong.” In a statement as Nassau’s lead trial counsel, he said it had been “a long road to hold Teva and Anda accountable for their conduct that has resulted in the deaths and grief of hundreds of thousands of Americans,” and that the two companies “need to now hear this jury and step up to take care of those who have suffered at their hands.”

In June 2022 Teva argued that the verdict should be overturned and that New York’s public-nuisance theory would open the door to endless litigation against companies selling products that can cause harm, soda and SUVs among them. “Teva and its subsidiaries have been whining and crying and advancing these tired arguments over and over again,” Shkolnik said. “It’s simple, the jury saw the truth.”

A Premium for the Trial Plaintiffs

Seven months after the verdict, Teva and AbbVie agreed to terms that would lead to a combined $6 billion paid directly to state and local governments. Shkolnik was among the members of the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee negotiating team in the national litigation who negotiated those terms. Under the global settlement that followed, Teva would pay up to $4.247 billion nationwide. The final terms called for $3.7 billion in cash over thirteen years and gave the option of taking $1.2 billion worth of Teva’s generic Narcan or an agreed cash equivalent paid over ten years. “The settlements mean nothing if we don’t get robust participation at the state and local level,” Shkolnik said when the papers were signed in November 2022, “so now that the very complicated papers are inked, we turn to secure the required level of participation so that funds can flow to our nation’s communities.”

Attorney General Letitia James announced New York’s settlement with Teva on November 3, 2022. New York’s share of the national settlement was $210,548,226.20. A separate Teva New York Agreement resolved the remedies phase that followed the verdict for $313,343,793.95, which the agreement called a “Premium Payment” to the trial plaintiffs—the State and the counties of Nassau and Suffolk—to be paid over eighteen years. In all, New York was to receive $523,892,020.15 from Teva. The agreement would take full effect for the two counties once their legislatures approved it, and New York’s Mental Hygiene Law § 25.18 required the opioid settlement money the attorney general had secured to be used for abatement, treatment, and prevention. Teva also accepted a ban on high-dose opioids, those over 40 milligrams, and on prescription savings programs, prohibitions on marketing opioids and on funding third parties that promote them, restrictions on political lobbying, and requirements to monitor and report off-label use of its transmucosal immediate-release fentanyl products and to disclose its opioid clinical data.

The agreement directed $131,343,793.95 of the premium to the New York Teva Opioid Settlement Fund and $91 million for each county, payable to its attorneys: Napoli Shkolnik for Nassau and Simmons Hanly Conroy for Suffolk. It scheduled Nassau’s $91 million in eighteen annual payments: $13,649,999.97 by March 1, 2023, and again on March 1, 2024; $2,100,000.11 on each March 1 from 2025 through 2037; and about $12.1 million on each March 1 from 2038 through 2040.

Asked in 2025 which of his trials stood out, Shkolnik said: “Just the fact that we tried one of the biggest and most impactful cases in the United States for seven months during COVID and won it.” A year earlier he had described what that verdict did to Teva’s position. “Taking a verdict against companies that were so recalcitrant, that refused to take any responsibility,” he said. “And the jury said, yes, you’re liable. And they went from offering pennies to paying half a billion, three quarters of $1 billion, maybe more.” He added: “Knowing that money is going to those communities that they were pretty much laughing at during the course of the trial.”

Insulin Payers and a Peruvian Mining Town

Shkolnik now practices from San Juan, Puerto Rico, as a partner in NSPR Law Services, which does business as Napoli Shkolnik, and was a founding board member of the Trial Lawyers of Puerto Rico. He still sits on the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee in the Cleveland opioid litigation, and U.S. District Judge Judith E. Levy appointed him co-liaison counsel in the Flint water crisis litigation. In December 2023 he was appointed to the executive committee for the self-funded payer track of the insulin-pricing litigation in federal court in New Jersey, MDL 3080, before Judges Brian R. Martinotti and Rukhsana L. Singh. The self-funded payers include local governments, unions, and schools that pay for prescription-drug coverage. Plaintiffs in the insulin cases allege that manufacturers including Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, and Eli Lilly engineered price increases through a kickback scheme.

He is also among the lawyers for more than 3,000 children who lived near Doe Run’s mining operations in Peru and allege that the operations gave them lead poisoning. “It is so highly toxic that when you’re in the mining town there, it looks like there are snowcaps, but they aren’t; it’s bleached white from acid rain,” he said in 2025.

Mary Freshwater’s Camp Lejeune Claim

After the Camp Lejeune Justice Act became law in August 2022, Shkolnik and his colleagues filed notices of claim on behalf of the Freshwater family. Mary Freshwater had raised her family at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when toxins in the base’s water were at their peak. While living in a section of the base called Paradise Point, she lost two infant sons to birth defects, one with an open spine and one without a cranium. She died in 2013, at 68, of two types of acute leukemia, which she was convinced had been caused by compounds such as benzene and the cleaning solvents TCE and PCE that had leaked into the base’s groundwater for years.

In September 2026 her daughter, Lori Freshwater, a writer and health researcher in Rhode Island, received a $400,000 settlement from the Justice Department for her mother’s death, an amount she will split with her brother. She said she struggled with the decision to accept when her lawsuit over her mother’s death, along with nearly 3,800 others pending in federal court in North Carolina, might soon end in a resolution requiring the government to pay billions of dollars to Camp Lejeune victims. She still has lawsuits pending over the deaths of her infant brothers and over her own harm.

In a September 14 court filing, the Justice Department said that 408,500 claims had been filed with the Navy, that the government had offered 3,637 claimants settlements of between $100,000 and $550,000, and that payments totaling $872 million had been made to 2,822 claimants. Federal judges in North Carolina gave the department and plaintiffs’ lawyers until October 30 to propose a way to settle all 3,784 lawsuits and more than 400,000 claims.

“There will never be true justice for our losses,” Lori Freshwater said. “There can’t be.” She added: “But we can stop allowing the wrongdoing by giving what’s left of our days over to a tragedy.”

“I don’t believe the mass settlement is coming anytime soon,” Shkolnik said. He has recommended that all of his Camp Lejeune clients accept settlements now rather than wait for the courts to determine the amounts to be awarded for individual damage claims. “I just think these are clients that have waited too long,” he said. “I don’t see telling your clients not to take this today rather than hoping to get more down the road.”