Robert Bilott

Robert Bilott did not set out to be a trial lawyer. He considered architecture and city planning before his father — an Air Force veteran who enrolled in law school after retirement — encouraged him to take the LSAT. In 1990, Bilott earned his J.D., cum laude, from the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and joined Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP in Cincinnati, where he has practiced for more than 35 years.

His first eight years at Taft were spent on the corporate defense side of environmental law, representing large chemical companies in regulatory and compliance matters. He made partner in 1998. That same year, a call from West Virginia farmer Wilbur Tennant — whose cattle were dying near a DuPont landfill — redirected his career entirely. As Bilott reviewed what became millions of pages of DuPont’s internal documents, he found that the company’s own scientists had identified PFOA as hazardous and said nothing. That discovery became the foundation for one of the longest and most consequential environmental legal battles in U.S. history.

In 2001, Bilott filed a federal class action on behalf of approximately 70,000 West Virginia and Ohio residents with PFOA-contaminated drinking water, settling in 2004 for benefits valued at over $300 million. Thousands of subsequent individual personal injury cases resulted in a $671.7 million settlement with DuPont in 2017, with total recoveries against DuPont ultimately exceeding $850 million. In 2023, Bilott was part of the legal team that reached the largest drinking water settlements in U.S. history — over $13 billion — with 3M and DuPont-related companies in the national AFFF multi-district litigation.

His work became the subject of a 2016 New York Times Magazine cover story, the 2019 feature film “Dark Waters” starring Mark Ruffalo, and his memoir “Exposure, ” published by Atria Books. In April 2024, the Biden administration announced the first federal drinking water standards for PFOA and PFOS — a regulatory outcome Bilott had formally petitioned the EPA to pursue in 2001.

Bilott is a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, a Fellow of the Right Livelihood College, and an Honorary Professor at the National University of Cordoba in Argentina. He received the Right Livelihood Award — widely known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize” — in 2017.