On March 10, 2026, the Department of Justice made it official: the pace of Camp Lejeune Elective Option settlements is accelerating.
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward announced that the DOJ Civil Division approved 649 Elective Option settlement offers totaling approximately $175 million in just three weeks — a 25% surge over the program’s prior pace. Since January 20, 2025, the DOJ has paid out more than $421 million, with $708 million in offers approved since the program launched in 2023.
That’s not a press conference talking point. That’s a structural shift in how the government is handling this litigation — and it has direct implications for every law firm with Camp Lejeune clients in their caseload.
The headline number is notable. But the more important development is buried in the details: on February 10, 2026, Woodward formally revoked the prior settlement approval authority and took personal control of the approval process.
Settlement approval authority had resided within the Torts Branch — the same team tasked with defending the government in active litigation. Woodward’s February 10 action moved that authority to the Associate AG, the senior DOJ official with institution-wide responsibility for resolving civil liability at scale.
The acceleration of EO approvals is good news — but it also creates pressure. Here’s the practical reality for law firms with active Camp Lejeune caseloads:
The DOJ’s documentation requirements haven’t changed. Of the more than 409,000 administrative claims still pending with the Navy, SimplyConvert’s research has found that only approximately 12% — roughly 49,000 claimants — meet the strict EO criteria. A significant portion of even those are stalled due to incomplete or insufficient substantiation records.
Approvals are moving faster. But claims without solid exposure documentation aren’t getting any closer to settlement.
The July 30, 2024 status report was the last one to include EO settlement figures. After that, the numbers went dark. For 19 months, plaintiff firms had no public window into how many offers were being made, accepted, or paid.
Woodward has committed to weekly approvals on a rolling basis and has made those figures public. Firms that get their documentation in order now — with properly formatted substantiation submitted through the Navy Portal — are positioned to move through the queue as approvals continue. Firms still manually searching for muster rolls or waiting for DD214s to arrive by mail are falling behind.
Here’s something most attorneys aren’t telling their clients clearly enough: EO settlements are explicitly protected from VA, Medicare, and Medicaid offsets. The DOJ’s own guidance confirms it — accept an EO offer, and the government will not claw back a dollar of your VA disability benefits, and CMS will not assert a Medicare fee-for-service offset.
That protection disappears the moment a case goes to litigation. Under the CLJA statute, courts are required to subtract “any” VA, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits tied to Camp Lejeune exposure from “any award” entered at trial — mandatory language, broad application.
For a veteran with significant VA disability benefits and a Tier 1 EO-qualifying disease, the math on holding out for trial may not be as favorable as it looks. A $450,000 EO offer, free of offsets, could materially outperform a larger trial award with substantial deductions applied. That’s a conversation plaintiff attorneys need to be having with clients now.
If you’ve been following the Camp Lejeune litigation closely, you may have heard that the government has its own digitization effort underway for USMC muster rolls. It’s tempting to think that effort will eventually solve the substantiation problem for your clients. That thinking is a litigation strategy risk.
Here is what the record actually shows:
Let that timeline sink in. The PLG first formally requested the DOJ’s digitized muster roll data in October 2023. More than two years later, the government is still characterizing its digitization effort as ongoing, to be shared “on a rolling basis,” with no firm delivery date and no mechanism in place to get that data to individual claimants or their attorneys through the Navy Portal.
The DOJ’s own production to date — nearly two terabytes of raw imagery — came without the tabular data or metadata that would make it searchable. The legacy server they pointed to at Quantico didn’t have what was requested. The USMC’s separate digitization project, which was supposed to have processed 61 million pages of muster rolls covering over 5 million unique service members by 2015, still hasn’t been delivered in usable form.
Even if the DOJ eventually delivers its muster roll database in a complete, structured, and searchable form — a date that remains unscheduled — there is no pathway to connect that data to individual claimants through the Navy Portal. The burden of substantiation remains on the claimant. The Navy has made that explicit. Waiting for the government to hand you the evidence is not a strategy — it’s a way to watch the settlement window move without your clients in it.
The DOJ’s ongoing struggle to deliver digitized, searchable muster roll data is not surprising to us. We spent three years solving the same problem — and we can tell you exactly why it’s hard.
Camp Lejeune muster rolls from the 1950s through the 1970s exist as deteriorated microfilm: blurred, light-damaged, handwritten, and never designed to be read by a computer. No commercial OCR tool on the market handles this material reliably. Our team had to build from scratch:
Custom OCR capable of reading deteriorated microfilm that defeated every commercial tool tested
A database architecture for records with no standardized format across decades of USMC administrative practice
AI trained specifically on USMC administrative conventions — abbreviations, unit designations, formatting variations
What the government is still working to digitize and deliver — we have already built, at scale, and it is available to plaintiff attorneys right now.
SimplyConvert built Semper Fi AI precisely because documentation gaps — not legal merit — are what’s keeping qualified Camp Lejeune claimants from getting paid.
The Navy has made clear that substantiating each claimant’s presence at Camp Lejeune is the claimant’s burden, not theirs. The Plaintiff’s Leadership Group and the Navy only have access to early muster rolls (pre-1959) and publicly available records. That leaves an enormous documentation gap for the majority of claimants whose service at Camp Lejeune falls in the 1960s, 70s, or 80s. Semper Fi AI bridges that gap.
SimplyConvert’s team spent months at the National Archives and Marine Corps Base Quantico, operating specialized microfilm equipment to digitize records accessible only on-site. They also sourced materials from private collectors and online platforms — acquiring yearbooks, phone directories, cruise books, and other Camp Lejeune artifacts unavailable through traditional channels.
The result: more than 3.2 million historical records, including:
Military muster rolls showing exact dates of station at Camp Lejeune (1953–1970)
Parris Island yearbooks documenting the date of entry for the majority of enlisted Marines
Base housing databases mapped to specific water distribution systems
Unit assignment records and deployment cruise books
Base phone directories, The Globe newspaper archives, and base newspapers
Birth certificates from Onslow County, NC, and Camp Lejeune High School yearbooks
Alumni records and additional historical documentation
This is the largest private collection of Camp Lejeune historical documentation available to plaintiff attorneys — and it contains records the PLG, the Navy, and the DOJ simply don’t have.
For each client, Semper Fi AI produces the Gold Form — a single, consolidated document built to meet the Navy’s requirements for EO claim substantiation. It includes a summary of the qualifying EO injury, a complete timeline of days at Camp Lejeune drawn from both DD214 records and documents in the Semper Fi AI database, and all supporting proof in condensed format ready for direct upload to the Navy Portal.
For attorneys who want it, the platform can also generate an optional EO Score for each client — a dynamic score based on injury and exposure data that can help frame the accept-or-wait decision. That said, the offset question is still unresolved: how courts ultimately treat VA, Medicare, and Medicaid deductions against trial awards could materially change what an EO offer is worth relative to litigation. Until that picture clarifies, the EO Score is best treated as one input among several — not a final answer.
As Featured in NBC News
“She sought to prove her grandfather was poisoned at Camp Lejeune. Records she found could help thousands.” — NBC News
If you have Camp Lejeune clients whose exposure records are incomplete, Semper Fi AI can help you find and present the evidence needed to substantiate their time at the base. If you have clients weighing an EO offer against the prospect of trial, Semper Fi AI can help you build the documentation picture that makes that decision an informed one.