Robert Bilott

Robert Bilott never planned on it. He wanted to be an architect, then a city planner, and was headed to graduate school when his father, who had retired after 20 years in the Air Force and enrolled in law school because he always wanted to be Perry Mason, urged him to take the LSAT. No one in the family had been a lawyer. He earned his J.D. in 1990, joined Taft Law’s environmental group in Cincinnati and spent eight years defending chemical companies before a 1998 phone call changed everything.

He came to trial work “kicking and screaming.” Robert describes himself as the quiet one in the back row who preferred digging through documents and writing briefs, until he watched trial lawyers like Mike Papantonio and Gary Douglas weave years of his detail into a story a jury could grasp. That drew him to storytelling beyond the courtroom: a book, a feature film, documentaries and public speaking. He also credits his eight years on the defense side with helping him understand both sides and reach innovative settlements.

One of his first trials was defending a company accused of pollution and noise affecting nearby residents; as defense lawyers, he recalls, they focused on what the law required rather than the impact on people, and he now calls that critical training. The case that redefined his career came in 1998, when West Virginia farmer Wilbur Tennant, referred by Robert’s grandmother in Parkersburg, called about cattle dying near a DuPont landfill. Millions of pages of DuPont documents showed the company’s own scientists had flagged PFOA as hazardous and said nothing.

Robert’s closing thought is that the chemicals he fought over in West Virginia and Ohio 30 years ago are the same PFAS now turning up in water, soil, air, plants, animals and people around the planet. When they surface in Japan, Australia or Italy, communities treat them as something new to be studied from scratch, while manufacturers keep telling lawmakers not enough is known. He argues the history and science already exist, the top U.S. agency now agrees, and that data should be used everywhere the chemicals are found.

In 2001 he filed a federal class action for approximately 70,000 West Virginia and Ohio residents with PFOA-contaminated water, settling in 2004 for benefits valued at over $300 million. The first three individual trials produced verdicts totaling $19.7 million, thousands of individual claims settled for $671.7 million in 2017, and total recoveries against DuPont exceed $850 million. In 2023 he was part of the team that reached over $13 billion in AFFF MDL settlements with 3M and DuPont-related companies, the largest drinking water settlements in U.S. history.

Because the DuPont case began in the late 1990s, Robert received hard-copy files he could read chronologically with paralegal Kathleen Welch, which is how he found the company’s own lawyers and scientists calling PFOA hazardous. Today, he says, he would have to negotiate agreed search terms with DuPont before discovery began, and he did not even know the chemical’s name, let alone that the company used eight different ways of referring to it. He warns law students that in a cover-up case, that makes discovery “almost an oxymoron.”

Robert Bilott earned a B.A. in political science and urban studies from New College of Florida in 1987 and his J.D., cum laude, from the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law in 1990. He was admitted in Ohio that year and joined Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP in Cincinnati (taftlaw.com), becoming partner in 1998. His work led to a 2016 New York Times Magazine cover story, the 2019 film “Dark Waters,” his memoir “Exposure” and the 2017 Right Livelihood Award.