Scott Summy

The residents sued Conoco and two of its subsidiaries over the contamination of their drinking water. The liability phase ended in 1997 with a jury verdict in their favor that found Conoco liable for compensatory and punitive damages. Before the jury finished deliberating on the amount of punitive damages, Conoco settled with the residents for $36 million.

Half of Santa Monica’s Water

In 1998 Summy sued on behalf of Communities for a Better Environment in California, a case that uncovered documents on what the companies knew of MTBE’s risks. Santa Monica had shut its Charnock wells in 1996, when MTBE was found in them; they had supplied more than six million gallons a day, about half of the city’s demand, and regulators required the oil companies to supply replacement water at a cost of more than $3 million a year. The city hired Summy and Baron & Budd and sued the oil companies in 2000. In 2003, Shell, ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil agreed to build treatment systems for the Charnock wells, and the court valued the city’s settlement at $315.5 million.

Summy, who graduated cum laude from Tarleton State University in 1986 and from Texas Tech University School of Law in 1990, started Baron & Budd’s Environmental Litigation Group in 2002; it now has 30 attorneys and support professionals. In the federal MTBE multidistrict litigation in New York, he was co-lead counsel for plaintiffs nationwide, representing 153 public water providers whose cases had been filed in 17 states. In May 2008, thirteen oil companies, among them BP Amoco, Atlantic Richfield, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, Marathon, Valero, CITGO, Sunoco and Hess, agreed to pay $423 million and to pay their share of treating the providers’ wells that become contaminated with MTBE and qualify for treatment over the next 30 years. The settlement was filed with U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin.

Two Kinds of Runoff

Atrazine, a herbicide used on corn and soybean crops, runs off easily into surface water. A water provider sued its maker in Illinois state court in 2004, and public drinking-water providers followed in 2010 in the Southern District of Illinois, where Summy and Steve Tillery of Korein Tillery were appointed class counsel for community water systems that had found atrazine in their supplies. On October 23, 2012, the court approved a $105 million class settlement with Syngenta that reimbursed more than 1,000 systems, serving more than 30 million people, for the cost of removing atrazine from their water. Summy said the settlement “sends a message to chemical companies that they must bear the responsibility.”

PCBs reach impaired waters in stormwater and dry-weather runoff. In November 2022, U.S. District Judge Fernando M. Olguin of the Central District of California gave final approval to a $537.5 million class settlement with Monsanto for 2,442 counties, cities, ports and other public entities responsible for reducing and monitoring those discharges. Summy, John Fiske and Carla Burke Pickrel of Baron & Budd were lead class counsel, and Summy said the money would go “directly to public entities burdened with reducing PCBs from stormwater and sediment.”

Flow Rates and PFAS Scores

Lawsuits over per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in firefighting foam were consolidated as MDL No. 2873 before U.S. District Judge Richard M. Gergel in Charleston, South Carolina. Summy is one of the plaintiffs’ three co-lead counsel, with Michael A. London and Paul J. Napoli. He co-chaired the General Liability Discovery Committee and the Science Committee, and he was one of the court-appointed settlement counsel and class counsel for public water systems.

Judge Gergel approved DuPont’s $1.185 billion settlement with public water systems on February 8, 2024, and 3M’s on March 29, 2024: a present-value commitment of up to $10.3 billion, payable over 13 years through 2036, with nominal payments capped at $12.5 billion. On November 22, 2024, he approved Tyco Fire Products’ $750 million and BASF’s $312.5 million. The money pays systems that have already detected PFAS and pays others to test.

Each system’s share is set by formula. Under the 3M allocation procedures, a system’s base score adds a capital-cost component, an EPA unit cost multiplied by its flow rate, to an operation-and-maintenance component that rises with its PFAS score, the sum of its highest PFOA and PFOS readings; its award is its adjusted score’s share of the action fund. Testing-reimbursement claims were due March 31, 2026, and systems in the settlements’ second phase had until July 31, 2026, to file their action-fund claims, with baseline PFAS results for each water source.

Back to the Cape Fear

In June 2017, Summy told WECT in Wilmington that the city could become the “poster child for GenX contamination.” DuPont, and then Chemours, had been making GenX at the Fayetteville Works plant since at least 1980 and discharging it into the Cape Fear River, about 100 miles upstream from Wilmington. Summy recalled the MTBE case, in which Conoco, like Chemours a spin-off of DuPont, had paid $36 million.

In February 2018 he filed suit in the Eastern District of North Carolina against Chemours and DuPont for private well owners near the plant, many of them near Marshwood Lake, where GenX had measured as high as six times the state’s health limit, seeking the cost of removing the chemicals from their wells and the aquifer; Harold Seagle of Seagle Law was co-counsel. “We intend to protect the rights of these private well owners,” Summy said. In January 2021 the firm filed 217 more suits for well owners near the plant.

Eleven North Carolina public entities he represented with Brett Land — Bladen, Brunswick, Columbus, Cumberland, New Hanover, Robeson and Sampson counties, Lumberton, Wrightsville Beach, Bald Head Island and the Lower Cape Fear Water and Sewer Authority — were excluded from the 2024 national class settlement for public water systems and sued DuPont, Chemours and Corteva alongside the state. With the case set for trial, the companies agreed on September 10, 2026, to pay the eleven $380 million over fifteen years, beginning in 2026; the state received $75 million in the same agreement. “This settlement is ultimately about helping these communities move forward,” Summy said.