The biggest question we get from victims is when they will receive a check from Camp Lejeune. Most victims understand that no attorney can provide the exact date they will receive an offer of settlement or eventual payment.
JAG, which is managing these claims for the government,datais "committed to resolving all claims relating to this matter in a fair and timely manner".
But what does this mean for you in terms of when your Camp Lejeune lawsuit will be resolved? Victims want some ideas. is it six months? One year? Two years? How long do lawyers really think it will take to settle the Camp Lejeune lawsuits?
On this page, our Camp Lejeune attorneys provide our best answer to the question of when Camp Lejeune cases can be resolved based on how the cases have been handled thus far and the litigation landscape faced by attorneys and victims alike. And yes, we do make a prediction of when we will see the first Camp Lejeune settlements.
Thousands of Camp Lejeune victims file complaints under CLJA
The Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, has seen some of the worst water contamination in US history. From 1953 until the late 1980s, the drinking water at Camp Lejeune contained extremely high levels of toxic cancer-causing chemicals. However, what made Camp Lejeune especially tragic was the fact that the victims of this contamination were mostly people who had served their country in the armed forces.
When the water contamination at Camp Lejeune finally became public, federal health agencies such as the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) stepped in and began testing and investigating to assess the impact. The ATSDR studies found that exposure to contaminated water in Lejeune caused higher rates of several different types of cancer, along with other health conditions.
Based on these findings, many victims of the Camp Lejeune contamination have filed civil lawsuits seeking government compensation for damage caused by the toxic water. Several hundred cases were filed in the early 2000s. All of these cases were eventually dismissed, however, on legal technicalities. A federal legal rule called the Feres doctrine, and North Carolina's state of rest statute effectively barred Camp Lejeune victims from filing civil suits for their injuries.
Not surprisingly, this was seen as a great injustice. In August 2022, Congress stepped in and sought to set things right by passing the Camp Lejeune Justice Act (CLJA), which was part of a larger bill called the PACT Act. According to the CLJA, anyone who lived or worked at Camp Lejeune between 1953 and 1988 for at least 30 days has the right to file a lawsuit against the government and seek compensation for damage caused by contaminated water.
As of January 2023, 14,000 victims of Camp Lejeune have filed claims under the CLJA. Thousands of additional Camp Lejeune claims are expected to be filed in the future. The rate of new claims of waterborne injuries at Camp Lejeune is likely to continue at that rate for the next six months, before dropping later this year.
Timeline of Camp Lejeune settlements?
Thousands of claimants from Camp Lejeune who claimed compensation under the CLJA are now wondering when they can expect to receive this compensation. The government will make liquidation offers inCamp Lejeune claims, or will these cases have to go to trial?
Before we give our best answers to these questions, we must first explain the 2-step process that all CLJA claims must go through.
STEP 1: File an Administrative Claim with the Navy
According to the CLJA, eligible Camp Lejeune victims have the right to file a civil action against the government to obtain compensation for their injuries. However, the CLJA provides that before civil claims can be filed in court, Camp Lejeune victims must first file an "administrative claim" with the Judges and Advocates General of the Navy (JAG).
Filing and exhausting an administrative claim with the JAG is a mandatory requirement under the CLJA. Anyone wishing to file a Camp Lejeune claim under the CLJA must first file a complaint with the JAG. After filing a complaint with JAG, complainants must wait until:
(i) the claim is formally denied by JAG; any
(ii) 6 months have passed since the complaint was filed and no action has been taken by JAG.
STEP 2: File a civil lawsuit in federal court
Once the JAG administrative claim requirement has been satisfied (either because JAG denied the claim or because 6 months have passed), CLJA claimants are eligible to move on to the next step, which involves filing a civil action . That starts next month on February 20, 2023. That's when the litigation really starts, and hopefully that leap kicks off Camp Lejeune's resolution efforts.
The CLJA allows Camp Lejeune victims to file civil suits against the federal government for injuries caused by toxic water. The CLJA requires that all Camp Lejeune lawsuits be filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Therefore, all claims, regardless of whether the victim is located in California, New York, Texas or anywhere in the US, will be filed in North Carolina, which has exclusive jurisdiction over all Camp claims.
Once the civil suit is filed, it will follow the normal procedural steps like any other personal injury case in federal court. There will be a testing phase and several procedural deadlines. At this point, the Camp Lejeune cases have not been consolidated into a class action or CDM. This means that each individual Camp Lejeune case will have its own deadlines and times. There will be no class action at Camp Lejeune. But there may be some consolidations for limited purposes to speed up the work in these cases.
Because thousands of Camp Lejeune lawsuits will be filed starting in February (6 months after the first JAG claims were filed). With this volume of cases, it simply will not be possible for the government (or the court) to litigate all of Camp Lejeune's claims.
At some point, the Camp Lejeune cases will have to be consolidated somehow. It's not clear to lawyers what form it will take, despite the fact that we've been in this litigation for four months.
When will the government make Camp Lejeune liquidation offers?
The government will make settlement offers in a large percentage of Camp Lejeune cases. This is something we can say with almost absolute certainty. There are already 14,000 complaints and by the language of the CLJA there is no way these cases can be filed en masse like last time.
It is difficult to overstate the enormity of this litigation. There is also no way for the government to separately litigate even a small percentage of these cases, let alone bring them to trial. There were just 2,121 civil trials in the entire federal court system last year (only 1,600 were jury trials), and there were fewer than a dozen civil trials in the Eastern District of North Carolina. It simply will not be physically possible for even 1% of Camp Lejeune cases to go to trial. Of course, there are lawsuits for damages with more plaintiffs. But there is no class action at Camp Lejeune. Therefore, each Lejune claim is independent. This creates a lot of work for everyone: the government, plaintiffs' attorneys, and North Carolina court officials.
So what does that mean? This means that the only realistic way the government can hope to resolve the thousands of cases at Camp Lejeune is by implementing some sort of global settlement strategy. Billions of dollars have already been earmarked for this purpose. The only question is when and how the Camp Lejeune settlements will take place... and how much the settlement compensation will be. Settlement payments are more difficult to design. But as you can see below, we've put a lot of thought into this and arrived at Camp Lejeune's expected payouts to victims.
Settlements during the JAG claim process
When the CLJA was first passed, our lawyers optimistically assumed that the government would attempt to resolve a large percentage of Camp Lejeune's claims during the JAG's 6-month administrative claims phase. This seemed to make sense given the reality that it would not be possible to litigate the cases separately. In hindsight, that was extremely naive. Victims who file an advance statement will be required to file aCamp Lejuene Suitpush for settlement.
Five months have passed since the first round of administrative claims from Camp Lejeune was filed with the JAG. That means JAG has just two months before the six-month deadline for these claims expires.
However, at this time, JAG has given no indication that it will make settlement offers on these claims before moving to STEP 2 and filing civil actions. But even more discouraging for those hoping to settle soon, the JAG has not even accepted or reviewed supporting documentation for CLJA claims (military service records, medical records, etc.).
Instead, the JAG website says it is working on a CLJA claims portal to allow submission of supporting documents. With just two months to go before initial claimants can file their civil cases, it seems highly unlikely that JAG will be in a position to assess the claims and make offers of settlement.
Think about it. JAG cannot afford to receive medical records, much less read them and make offers based on the records. We want to give people the good news that Camp Lejeune settlements are not far away. But this reality is a powerful antidote to this optimism.
Offers settlement at Camp Lejeune after filing civil suit
Once the six-month administrative claim requirement is met, initial CLJA claimants will move on to file civil claims with the EDNC. When that happens, things will change significantly because the government won't have time to sit back and do nothing. Once a civil case is pending, deadlines will start to creep in and the government will essentially be forced to resolve the Camp Lejeune cases or be overwhelmed.
Our attorneys hope that the Department of Justice will develop some sort of global settlement program under which Camp Lejeune plaintiffs can qualify for a settlement offer by going through a claims verification process. It's honestly surprising that they haven't developed this process yet to at least try to stay ahead of the curve. The DOJ will require plaintiffs to provide supporting documents and, upon receipt, a predetermined offer of settlement will be made based on an initial.
The matrix will basically provide settlement values for cases that fall into certain categories or levels, similar to the settlement levels we see in mass torts. Authors at the highest settlement levels will receive the highest settlement offer amounts, while authors at the lowest settlement levels will receive the lowest settlement offers.
When do we expect the first Camp Lejeune release offers?
Our best guess as of January 2023 is that we could see the first Camp Lejeune settlements between summer 2023 and early 2024.
He can be very optimistic. But necessity is the mother of invention in competent people. And JAG and DOJ are full of extremely talented people. The pressure of pretrial obligations and pending trial dates will force JAG to catch up and make settlement offers to make the Camp Lejeune litigation more manageable.
What will affect Camp Lejeune offers?
We talk more elsewhere about the settlement values we projected in the Camp Lejeune litigation. The most important factor in determining how much a Camp Lejeune case is worth and at what level of settlement the case may end is the type of harm alleged by the plaintiff. Some injuries and cancers are strongly related to water at Camp Lejuene. Others have a more tenuous connection and this is reflected in our settlement estimates.
Below are our current settlement payment amount estimates for Camp Lejeune cases based on injury type.
TYPE OF LOSS ESTIMATED SETTLEMENT VALUE
The most important factor in determining how much a Camp Lejeune case is worth and at what level of settlement the case can end will be the type of harm alleged by the plaintiff. Below are our current settlement payment amount estimates for Camp Lejeune cases based on injury type.
| TYPE OF INJURY | ESTIMATED SETTLEMENT AMOUNT |
| bladder cancer | $ 200.000 - $ 425.000 |
| Cancer cerebral | $ 600.000 - $ 1.200.000 |
| cervical cancer | $ 150.000 - $ 340.000 |
| colon cancer | $ 100.000 - $ 280.000 |
| esophageal cancer | $ 210.000 - $ 600.000 |
| kidney cancer | $ 175.000 - $ 425.000 |
| Leukemia | $ 220.000 - $ 575.000 |
| liver cancer | $ 260.000 - $ 550.000 |
| lung cancer | $ 200.000 - $ 450.000 |
| lymphoma | $ 250.000 - $ 475.000 |
| ovarian cancer | $ 150.000 - $ 340.000 |
| Parkinson disease | $ 1.000.000 - $ 1.500.000 |
| Myelodysplastic syndromes | $ 110.000 - $ 320.000 |
| scleroderma | $ 120.000 - $ 275.000 |
| Anemia | $ 110.000 - $ 250.000 |
| manslaughter | US$ 400.000 – US$ 1.500.000 |
| Sterility | $ 100.000 - $ 250.000 |
| birth defects | $ 250.000 - $ 2.000.000 |
If you click on the links you will get more details on how we arrived at these Camp Lejeune settlement compensation predictions.
We spend time and effort predicting these settlement values. But these are just predictions about what the average payouts might be. Our legal counsel continues to review these projections as new information becomes available.
Get in touch with our Camp Lejeune lawyers
Our Camp Lejeune attorneys have spoken to thousands of victims in this litigation. Contact us today at800-553-8082for a free consultation orGetour Camp Lejeune lawyers online.