Camp Lejeune Water Contamination

We are representing veterans and families of veterans who lived or worked at Camp

Lejeune for at least 30 days between August 1, 1953 and December 31, 1987 and later suffered an illness linked to the contaminated water at Camp Lejeune. Bladder cancer, kidney cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, Parkinson’s and many other diseases have been linked to contaminated water at Camp Lejeune.

Since passage of the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, over 400,000 administrative claims have been submitted to the Navy and over 3,000 lawsuits have been filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina.

At this point in time, the only settlement program in place is the government’s Elective Option (“EO”) Settlement Program. Only a small portion of the administrative claims filed are considered eligible for the EO Program. The claimant must show the requisite diagnosis and presence at Camp Lejeune. The criteria for the EO Program is very rigid and excludes thousands of legitimate claims. Additionally, for many claimants, EO settlement amounts are inadequate in light of the years of suffering they have gone through. Nonetheless, for claimant’s where the EO Settlement is a good fit, we have been able to guide eligible claimant’s through this rigid process.

Unless a global settlement is formulated, the majority of claims will have to enter formal litigation. Litigation in the Eastern District of North Carolina is underway. The initial group of Track 1 cases, focusing on leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, has been assigned to a judge. The first group of trials is set to be scheduled.

Per the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, the deadline to file claims passed in August 2024. While we can no longer file new claims, we are still filing lawsuits for claims that met the administrative claim deadline last year, but have not filed a lawsuit yet or do not fit the EO Settlement Program.