Robin L. Greenwald

The rig sank two days after the explosion, and the well was capped on July 15, 2010. The medical settlement class took in people who had worked on the cleanup at any time between April 20, 2010, and April 16, 2012, and people who had lived for at least sixty days in 2010 in designated beachfront and wetland zones: about 90,000 cleanup workers, about 100,000 beachfront residents and nearly 5,000 wetland residents, as many as 200,000 people in all.

U.S. District Judge Carl J. Barbier’s order approving the settlement drew its history of the talks with BP from declarations that included Greenwald’s. The negotiating teams met or spoke nearly daily from late July 2011 until the agreement was filed on April 18, 2012. They consulted medical and scientific experts on data about oil and dispersants, and Magistrate Judge Shushan supervised discussions of key terms. Judge Barbier granted final approval in New Orleans on January 11, 2013.

The payment matrix was uncapped, so all qualifying claims would be paid. For chronic conditions at Level B1, the matrix paid $60,700 to a cleanup worker and $36,950 to a resident. Class members could receive an initial medical consultation and further visits every three years over the program’s twenty-one-year life, and BP committed $105 million over five years to the Gulf Region Health Outreach Program’s community health projects.

A Claim Kept Open for Later Illness

For conditions claimed to have manifested after April 16, 2012, the settlement created the Back-End Litigation Option, known as BELO. A class member had four years from the first diagnosis, or from the settlement’s effective date if that came later, to give BP notice. BP could choose mediation; if it declined, or if mediation failed, the class member could sue in federal court in the Eastern District of Louisiana.

Several questions were closed in advance. In a BELO suit the class member “need not prove and may not litigate at trial” exposure, BP’s fault or the existence of the agreement, and BP agreed to forgo defenses based on prescription, limitations, repose and laches. What remained for the class member to prove was the diagnosis; the amount, location and timing of the releases; the level and duration of exposure; causation, including alternative causes; and compensatory damages.

Greenwald was BELO liaison counsel. The case management order Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Wilkinson, Jr. signed on January 30, 2015, listed her in that role and required each complaint to carry the title “BELO Complaint” and to state the venue, the condition, the date of first diagnosis and the circumstances of exposure.

From Federal Prosecutor to Plaintiffs’ Counsel

“Much of my law career has been devoted to investigations of corporate wrongdoing,” Greenwald has said. She was an Assistant United States Attorney and Deputy Chief in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, and Assistant Chief of the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section in Washington, in charge of legislation, policy and special litigation. Beginning in 1999 she was general counsel to the Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General. From 2001 to 2003 she was executive director of Waterkeeper Alliance, and she directed the Environmental Law Clinic at Rutgers University School of Law as a clinical professor of environmental law. A graduate of the University of Illinois, with a bachelor’s degree in 1977 and a law degree in 1982, she joined Weitz & Luxenberg in 2005.

There she served as plaintiffs’ liaison counsel in the federal litigation over methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, a gasoline additive that can affect the taste and odor of drinking water at extremely low levels. The cases, consolidated as MDL 1358, were brought for public water providers against more than 50 petroleum companies. In May 2008, about a dozen oil companies, among them ConocoPhillips, Shell, BP, Chevron and Marathon, agreed to pay $423 million to settle claims over 153 public water systems in 17 states and to treat future contaminated wells for 30 years, in a settlement filed with U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in New York.

Weitz & Luxenberg filed suit against Monsanto over its Roundup weedkiller in the fall of 2015, and Greenwald became co-lead counsel for plaintiffs in the federal multidistrict litigation before Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California. In June 2020, with trial dates set for 33 plaintiffs, a settlement reached through the court-appointed mediator, Kenneth Feinberg, was announced for almost 100,000 Americans diagnosed with cancer after Roundup exposure. “It has been a long journey,” Greenwald said. She was also on the coordinated plaintiffs’ team in the Porter Ranch–Aliso Canyon well blowout cases in Los Angeles County Superior Court, which settled in September 2021 for up to $1.8 billion for about 35,000 plaintiffs; the leak, discovered on October 23, 2015, at the Standard Sesnon 25 well, had run for 118 days and sent nearly 8,000 households into temporary housing.

Water Contaminated From 1953 to 1987

On July 19, 2023, four judges of the Eastern District of North Carolina named Greenwald co-lead counsel on a seven-member leadership team for the plaintiffs in the Camp Lejeune cases. The suits arise under the Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022, part of the PACT Act. The Department of Health and Human Services has acknowledged that the base’s water was contaminated from 1953 to 1987, and routine testing found trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, vinyl chloride and benzene. At the time of her appointment, more than 60,000 administrative claims had been filed with the Navy and more than 1,000 complaints in federal court, and Greenwald said the PACT Act gave veterans “the opportunity to right the decades-old wrong done to them.”

By October 2, 2026, 3,796 complaints had been filed under the Act in the district, and the Navy’s Camp Lejeune Claims Unit was processing 408,500 deduplicated administrative claims. On September 6, 2023, the Justice Department and the Navy announced an Elective Option with set payments for diseases in two tiers. For Tier 1, which covers kidney cancer, liver cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia and bladder cancer, the amounts were $450,000 for more than five years of exposure, $300,000 for one to five years and $150,000 for 30 to 364 days, with $100,000 more on a death claim. By March 10, 2026, the Justice Department had approved 2,531 Elective Option offers totaling about $708 million.

Diagnosed in 1997, Set for Trial in 2026

David Fancher, a Marine, was stationed at Camp Lejeune between October 1979 and June 1981. In December 1997, at 39, he was diagnosed with clear-cell renal cell carcinoma, a kidney cancer, and on December 12 of that year he underwent surgery to remove his right kidney. He sued the United States in 2023. In the pretrial order entered after a conference on September 9, 2026, the parties stipulated to his diagnosis and his surgery, and to his having filed the administrative claim the law requires before suit.

Frank Mousser’s case, another kidney-cancer claim, is also before U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle, who reset both trials on September 16, 2026. The joint status report filed on October 2, which Greenwald signed as co-lead counsel for plaintiffs, gave the dates: October 26 for Mousser and November 9 for Fancher, forty-five years after Fancher left the base and nearly twenty-nine years after his diagnosis.