Corporate Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s ‘Worst Nightmare’

Rob Bilott was about to be named a partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister when he took on farmer Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W. Va. as a client. Tennant’s land, where hundreds of cattle grazed, was adjacent to a landfill DuPont was using for its chemical wastes. After DuPont began disposing of waste there, Tennant’s livestock and other animals on the property began to act deranged, bleed from the nose and mouth, and hundreds died. In 1999, Bilott filed a federal lawsuit against DuPont, setting off more than a dozen years of litigation and revealing massive health and safety breaches to its workers and local communities that DuPont had hidden, or failed to disclose, for decades. In a lengthy profile, the New York Times Magazine outlines how Bilott took on the international coroporation in a step that led DuPont to a $16.5 million settlement with the EPA in 2005, to agree to a $70 million class action settlement, and to fund $33 million in epidemiological studies that led 3,535 plaintiffs to file personal injury lawsuits against the company.