Michelle Simpson Tuegel
Survivor Rights · Sports Abuse · University and Hotel Negligence
The Slalom Course
Before she was a lawyer, Michelle Simpson Tuegel was a world-ranked athlete in slalom water skiing — a sport of buoys and boat wakes, scored by how many buoys a skier rounds at specified boat speeds and rope lengths. She grew up in a family of trial lawyers, so the courtroom was never foreign territory; the water gave her the rest: the training hours nobody sees, the injuries absorbed and worked through, the discipline of performing when everything is moving fast.
Both inheritances shaped what she became — an advocate who understands, from the inside, what an athlete gives to a sport and what it costs when the adults entrusted with that athlete betray her.
The Hardest Cases First
Tuegel began her career on the defense side of criminal law, including capital cases — work in which a client's life could turn on the thoroughness of the lawyer standing next to him. Death-penalty defense taught her to master enormous records, to humanize a client a jury has been conditioned to fear, and to carry the emotional weight of representation without flinching.
Then came Title IX. Representing students affected by sexual assault on college campuses, she found the work that would define her: cases where the client's trust is the whole foundation, and where the defendant across the table is often larger, richer, and more practiced at silence than the person she represents. She never went back.
The Nassar Litigation
Tuegel represented survivors of Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics and Michigan State physician, in the litigation that reordered American sports.
In May 2018, attorneys for 332 survivors and Michigan State University announced a $500 million global settlement — $425 million for then-current claimants, $75 million reserved for future ones, and no confidentiality or nondisclosure agreements attached. The absence of NDAs was not a footnote. It meant the settlement compensated survivors without purchasing their silence.
She carried the fight beyond the courthouse. When Texas weighed legislation on accountability for universities and sports organizations, Tuegel reached out to Senator Kirk Watson, who arranged for three of her Nassar clients — among them elite Dallas gymnasts — to testify before the Legislature about why responsibility could not stop with one man.
A Bankruptcy Built for Survivors
USA Gymnastics filed for Chapter 11 protection in December 2018, moving roughly 510 sexual-abuse claims into a world of claim forms, creditor votes, insurance negotiations, and plan confirmation — a forum built for balance sheets, not for people.
Tuegel represented more than two dozen former national-team and Olympic gymnasts and served as one of the lead attorneys on the resolution. Her assignment was to make the bankruptcy work for the survivors rather than around them: a finite estate, layered insurers, a governing body, and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee, all pulled toward a single coordinated outcome.
In December 2021, after a five-year fight, the court confirmed a plan providing a settlement valued at $380 million. Survivors voted overwhelmingly to accept it. The plan paired compensation with athlete-safety provisions and survivor-participation commitments made enforceable through the reorganization itself — money and reform, welded together.
USC and Michigan
Tuegel's university work continued with the University of Southern California matter, arising from abuse by its campus gynecologist, which reached an $852 million settlement in 2021. At the University of Michigan, a $490 million settlement followed in 2022 — $460 million for approximately 1,050 claimants and $30 million for future claimants who elected to participate.
Behind each headline number sat the granular work Tuegel's practice is built on: claimant-specific histories and records, privacy protections, eligibility and allocation positions, and each survivor's own decision about whether and how to participate. Common structures; individual people. She never let the first erase the second.
The Room at the Hotel
Kathleen Dawson's case asked a different question, in front of a jury. Dawson, incapacitated, was moved by hotel personnel and police into a male coworker's room — no verification of her identity, no check of her own registered room. The coworker then sexually assaulted her.
As trial counsel, Tuegel aimed the negligence case at the hotel's own systems: registration records establishing who controlled which room, surveillance video reconstructing the staff's response hour by hour, identification and key procedures, guest-safety rules, and the choices employees made against all of it. The jury was never asked to treat Hilton as the perpetrator; it was asked whether the hotel's procedural failures created the foreseeable danger that a predator then exploited.
In November 2021, a Harris County jury answered with a $44 million verdict and assigned ninety percent of the responsibility to Hilton — among the largest sexual-assault verdicts ever returned against a hotel chain, and a public judgment in a field where defendants usually settle in private.
First to File
After the October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, Tuegel was among the first attorneys in the country to file suit against MGM Resorts and Live Nation — on behalf of a young woman whose family came from Tuegel's own hometown. The litigation she helped set in motion ended in an $800 million settlement for victims.
She Wins
Tuegel founded The Simpson Tuegel Law Firm in Dallas, which practices under the She Wins Law banner — a name that states the mission without apology.
She earned her undergraduate degree from Rollins College and her law degree from Baylor Law School, and is admitted in Texas, New York, and Montana, representing clients nationwide. The competitor from the slalom course is still visible in all of it: she takes the run at full speed, and she takes it for someone else.