In August 2018, a San Francisco jury told a former school groundskeeper named Dewayne Johnson that Monsanto owed him $289 million. That was the number in every headline. It is not the number he was paid.
Months later the trial judge cut the punitive portion of the award, bringing the total to roughly $78.5 million. In July 2020, the California Court of Appeal upheld the finding that Monsanto was liable but trimmed the award again, this time to about $20.5 million. Johnson was paid late that year, more than two years after the verdict that made him famous, at roughly seven cents on the headline dollar.
Nothing went wrong in that case. That is simply how the system works. And if you are following a mass tort because you or someone in your family may have a claim, understanding why the number moves is the difference between an informed decision and a disappointment.
A verdict belongs to one person
Mass torts are groups of individual lawsuits, not class actions. When thousands of cases share a defendant and a theory of injury, courts pick a handful to try first. These are called bellwether trials, and their purpose is to show both sides what juries do with the evidence.
A bellwether verdict is real money for that plaintiff. For everyone else, it is information. It tells the parties how strong the science looked in a courtroom, which arguments landed, and roughly what a jury thought an injury of that severity was worth. It does not entitle any other claimant to the same figure, and it does not mean the case is over.
Why the number shrinks
After a plaintiff verdict, the losing side files post-trial motions. A judge can reduce an award through remittitur, offering the plaintiff a lower figure or a new trial. Punitive damages get the closest scrutiny, because the Supreme Court has held that awards far out of proportion to the actual harm raise due process problems, and it has suggested that few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio to compensatory damages will survive review.
Then comes the appeal, which typically takes one to three years. An appellate court can affirm liability while cutting damages, which is exactly what happened to Johnson. It can also order a new trial or throw the case out. Every step is a chance for the number to change, and it almost always changes downward.
An aggregate settlement is a fund, not a check
The other kind of number that misleads is the global settlement figure.
In August 2023, 3M agreed to contribute $6.01 billion to resolve Combat Arms earplug claims brought by roughly 260,000 veterans and service members. Reported that way, it sounds like a windfall. Divide it and the picture changes: the arithmetic works out to something in the neighborhood of $23,000 per claimant, before fees, before costs, and paid out on a schedule that runs to 2029 rather than all at once.
Individual payments in that program were never meant to be equal. Claimants are sorted into tiers by the severity of the injury, the strength of the documentation, and other case-specific factors, so some awards are far larger than the average and many are smaller. A grid or a point system, not the headline, determines what any particular person receives.
Gross is not net
Whatever figure lands, several things come out of it before the claimant sees anything.
There is the contingency fee, set by the retainer agreement. There are case costs, which in a mass tort can include expert work and record collection. There is often a common benefit assessment, a percentage held back to compensate the lawyers who did the shared work of the litigation for everyone. And there are liens: Medicare and Medicaid have statutory reimbursement rights, private health plans frequently have contractual ones, and those must be resolved before a claim closes.
A claimant told they are in a tier worth $75,000 is not receiving $75,000. Ask early what the fee is, what costs are charged, and who has a lien.
Settlement is not an admission, and it is final
Companies settle for reasons that have little to do with guilt. Certainty, cost, and the ability to stop the bleeding on legal spend are usually enough. A settlement agreement almost never includes an admission of wrongdoing, and reading one as a confession will lead you to expect a value the case does not have.
The finality cuts the other way. To be paid, a claimant signs a release of claims, which ends the right to sue that defendant over the same injury even if the condition worsens later. That is the trade, and it is why the tier a claim lands in matters more than any headline.
Better questions than “what is the average”
There is no reliable average in a mass tort, and any source that offers one is either selling something or repeating a number that has already been reduced on appeal.
The useful questions are narrower.
- What has to be proved to qualify at all?
- Which documents establish exposure and diagnosis? Do those records still exist?
- Is the litigation at the pleading stage, the bellwether stage, or in settlement administration? This determines the timeline more than anything else.
- What does the fee, cost, and lien picture looks like in writing?
Those answers are less satisfying than a nine-figure verdict. They are also the ones that predict what actually happens.
