Robin L. Greenwald

Deepwater Horizon: Benefits That Wait

The Deepwater Horizon response placed tens of thousands of cleanup workers near crude oil, weathered hydrocarbons, smoke, and chemical dispersants. Residents of designated Gulf Coast waterfront areas also faced potential exposure. Some conditions were diagnosed soon after the disaster; others might not appear until years after the last cleanup boom was lifted from the Gulf.

Greenwald negotiated the Medical Benefits Class Action Settlement in the multidistrict litigation as part of the plaintiffs' committee, and the court's approval order cited her declaration concerning the negotiations, the use of experts, and the settlement's design. The negotiations lasted approximately ten months and became nearly daily toward the end, with a magistrate judge participating.

For qualifying existing conditions, the agreement provided scheduled compensation without one aggregate cap on those claims. It made medical consultations generally available every three years for twenty-one years and allocated $105 million to community-health outreach. Administration distributed approximately $67 million to affected workers and residents — individual benefits joined to a long-term public-health resource for Gulf communities.

The Back-End Litigation Option

The settlement's most inventive feature addressed the disease that had not happened yet. The Back-End Litigation Option, known as BELO, preserved a route for qualifying conditions first manifesting after April 16, 2012: diagnosis begins a notice process leading to mediation and, when necessary, adjudication in federal court.

BP stipulated or waived key issues involving exposure, fault, and limitations; claimants remained responsible for claimant-specific medical and causation proof. The structure let common issues be resolved once, through the settlement, while preserving individualized review of later disease claims — and allowed medical evidence to be developed when a qualifying condition actually appeared, rather than forcing unknown future disease to be valued at the settlement date.

Greenwald served as liaison counsel in BELO case management, organizing complaints, medical records, venue decisions, and procedures for the individual cases that followed, and she continued evaluating the process after implementation, advocating for workable treatment of later-manifested disease.

Camp Lejeune

Greenwald serves as co-lead counsel for plaintiffs in the Camp Lejeune water litigation, connecting common evidence concerning the water systems and contamination history with claimant-specific records of service or residence, exposure periods, diagnosis, treatment, causation, and damages.

The scale is unlike anything else on a federal docket. By July 2026, the litigation comprised 3,756 complaints and approximately 408,500 deduplicated administrative claims, managed through individual dockets and common master-docket rulings while principal expert disclosures and depositions advanced the shared exposure and causation record. A June 2026 court order reappointed the plaintiffs' leadership group through October 30 and directed weekly work with the Justice Department and settlement masters toward a possible global resolution.

The Justice Department and Navy established an Elective Option for eligible claims — the Navy applying it to administrative claims, the Justice Department using an analogous process for qualifying filed cases. As of July 17, 2026, the federal government reported more than $968 million in offers and more than $801 million in payments through the compensation process. Greenwald helps coordinate administrative offers, filed cases, scientific and historical evidence, and individual documentation across all of it.

Roundup, MTBE, and Porter Ranch

Greenwald and her colleagues filed the first Roundup case in 2015 — the opening filing in litigation that grew to well over one hundred thousand lawsuits nationwide — and she served as co-lead counsel in the federal Roundup multidistrict litigation against Monsanto, continuing to try cases primarily in Missouri state courts.

Earlier, she served as lead counsel in the multidistrict litigation against more than fifty petroleum companies for contaminating the nation's groundwater with the gasoline additive MTBE. The litigation helped create new law on market-share liability theories and defeated the defendants' preemption arguments. She also served on the executive committee of the Los Angeles JCCP arising from the Aliso Canyon methane-well blowout at Porter Ranch, which settled for $1.8 billion.

Sixteen Years of Enforcement First

Greenwald spent her first sixteen years at the Department of Justice — as an Assistant United States Attorney and Deputy Chief in the Eastern District of New York, then as Assistant Chief of the Environmental Crimes Section in Washington, in charge of legislation, policy, and special litigation. In 1997 the Section recognized her with its Outstanding Service Award. She then served as general counsel to the Interior Department's inspector general, led Waterkeeper Alliance as executive director from 2001 to 2003, and taught as a clinical professor of environmental law at Rutgers, directing the school's Environmental Law Clinic.

She joined Weitz & Luxenberg in 2005 and remains a partner and co-chair of its Environmental Toxic Torts and Consumer Protection group. The through-line she describes is a single goal: protecting the environment and obtaining relief for people who become sick, or whose property is damaged, because of industry pollution that could and should have been avoided.

In 2023, she was inducted into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame. Greenwald earned both her undergraduate degree, in English, and her law degree from the University of Illinois.