Camp Lejeune Water Lawsuits

The Latest Camp Lejeune Lawsuit Update

September 2025

For those of you waiting for an update on settlement, we do not have much to report. The Navy’s portal now has 158,680 claims with supporting documents, but only about 51,298 involve conditions eligible for streamlined settlement under the Elective Option. As we have said many times, the Elective Option is the right move for some, but it is not the path to resolve this litigation.

The good news is that the path to trial is getting clearer, and trials are what will lead us to settlements. The first group of trials, Track 1 cases involving leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, are moving forward. Discovery is deep into its final phases, with all expert depositions nearly complete across three stages: water contamination, general causation, and specific causation. The court has set a key deadline of September 10, 2025, for significant motions, including Daubert challenges and summary judgment arguments, which will shape what evidence and expert opinions actually make it to trial.

Plaintiffs are pushing back against government attempts to cut off late-emerging medical updates, rightly arguing that these victims often face worsening health and newly diagnosed conditions. Meanwhile, the United States is angling to exclude portions of plaintiffs’ expert testimony, challenging the scope and timeliness of their opinions.

In sum, progress is happening. But it is procedural, grinding, and far from the finish line that most victims are hoping for. If there is one takeaway for claimants: get your supporting documents in order, and don’t expect the government to make the first move. The legal gears are turning, but this machine still needs pressure to deliver justice with anything resembling urgency.

Annoying Motion

The government filed a motion to dismiss on Wednesday the five kidney cancer lawsuits heading for trial.

Rather than confront the mountain of scientific testimony asserting that Camp Lejeune’s water with TCE, PCE, benzene, etc., caused kidney cancer in exposed veterans and their families, the Department of Justice has opted to attack the formatting of the evidence. They do not dispute the exposures. They do not even meaningfully contest that the chemicals are carcinogenic. Instead, they ask the court to toss these bellwether plaintiffs’ claims because, in their view, the expert witnesses either used the wrong legal phrasing or failed to meet the DOJ’s ever-shifting methodological purity tests.

According to the government, testimony from physicians, toxicologists, and epidemiologists who say it is “more likely than not” that Camp Lejeune’s chemicals caused these cancers should be thrown out because apparently that phrase, while good enough for civil liability in any other context, does not satisfy their preferred evidentiary bar. And if the plaintiffs’ experts had the audacity to use the phrase “at least as likely as not, ”a standard directly lifted from VA disability benefits decisions, the government wants that tossed, too.

It is a tortured reading of Daubert standards, delivered with the straight-faced insistence that a decades-long pattern of rare kidney cancers among individuals exposed to known carcinogens somehow lacks “reliable” causation proof. This from the same government that acknowledged Camp Lejeune’s contamination as a public health disaster and enacted the CLJA to make victims whole. This is not in the spirt of that congressional intent.

New Opinion

The Fourth Circuit’s recent decision on August 18, 2025 in Sommerville v. Union Carbide Corp. involved a medical monitoring claim arising from exposure to ethylene oxide emissions in West Virginia. The appellate court reversed a district court’s dismissal, holding that exposure creating a present need for medical testing constitutes a concrete injury sufficient for Article III standing. The court also reinstated the plaintiff’s expert testimony on exposure, finding that disputes over the expert’s methodology went to weight rather than admissibility.

Defense lawyers for the United States quickly flagged Sommerville in the Camp Lejeune docket, suggesting it might bolster their arguments about water modeling and evidentiary standards. But the reality is that Sommerville likely helps plaintiffs more than defendants. By validating medical monitoring as a standalone injury and lowering the bar for expert admissibility, the Fourth Circuit has made it easier for toxic exposure plaintiffs—including those at Camp Lejeune—to survive early motions and reach trial. For plaintiffs, this decision strengthens the very foundation of claims built on exposure and the need for medical oversight, while limiting the government’s ability to knock cases out on technical standing or Daubert grounds.

Importantly, the Fourth Circuit stressed that “challenges to the reliability of [plaintiff’s] expert go to weight, not admissibility, and are for the jury to evaluate.” In other words, once an expert clears the basic Daubert threshold, it is the jury, not the judge, who decides whether that testimony is persuasive. For Camp Lejeune, that means the government will have a harder time excluding plaintiffs’ water modeling and causation experts at the gate, and more of these cases will be decided where they belong: in front of juries. It might make it harder to exclude defense experts, too, of course. But we are all very comfortable with juries deciding these cases… or in this case, judges as factfinders making the call. Because the plaintiffs are on the right side in this litigation.

Camp Lejeune Lawsuit: Settlement Updates & Key Information for 2025