Hair Relaxer Lawsuit Settlement Amounts

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Hair Relaxer Lawsuit — Free, Confidential Consultation

Nobody has been paid yet. Anyone quoting a number is guessing.

It sounds like you have already read three different numbers. Here is what actually decides what a case is worth — and why those pages disagree with each other.

Active litigation — no settlement. MDL 3060 underway · 12,381 cases pending · filing deadlines vary by state and run from when you knew or should have known.

Did you get relaxers — perms, the white cream — every few weeks, for years?

That one question decides most of it. It seems like nobody ever told you the risk was anything worse than a scalp burn.

See where I standfree · confidential · 2 minutes · an honest answer either way
What the lawsuit is actually about →

No receipts needed · you don’t have to remember every brand · no fee unless there is a recovery. Court costs and litigation expenses are advanced by counsel and repaid from the recovery. You are not responsible for court costs or litigation expenses if there is no recovery, unless a court directs otherwise. The attorney’s fee is a percentage of the gross recovery, calculated before expenses are deducted.

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Marin & Murphy Law Firm

Every inquiry gets a personal review and a straight answer — including “not yet” or “no” — free and without obligation.

Claims are brought against the companies that made and sold chemical relaxers — not against your stylist, your salon, or the person who did your hair growing up. Conversations are confidential. Some matters may be referred to or handled with other law firms. No settlement has been announced and no trial has been held; every case depends on its own facts. This page does not diagnose anything. Attorney Advertising.

This page is about a lawsuit — it is legal information, not medical advice, and it does not diagnose anything. Questions about your health belong with your own doctor.

Lawsuits consolidated in federal court in Chicago (MDL 3060) allege that long-term use of chemical hair relaxers is associated with uterine cancer, ovarian cancer, and related conditions. As of October 2026 the cases are in pretrial proceedings; no trial has been held and no settlement has been announced. The allegations have not been proven, and each case depends on its own facts.

Why the numbers you have already seen disagree

It sounds like you have already been given three or four different answers to one question, each stated with total confidence, none of them matching. That is not you failing to find the right page. It is what happens when several sites reason from the same absence.

If you searched this before landing here, you have probably been shown three or four different ranges by three or four different sites, each presented with confidence, none matching the others. Not because one has better information — because none has any. There is no settlement, no verdict, no published resolution here to reason from. Those figures are extrapolations from other product-liability cases, and several of the sites publishing them concede in their own fine print that manufacturers have not settled or paid anything.

We publish no figure here. Not as a hedge — as the accurate answer. When there is something real to report, this page will report it and cite the order it came from. What this page can give you instead is the thing a figure would eventually be attached to: the docket, and the factors an assessment actually turns on.

What the docket actually shows

The hair relaxer lawsuit is a set of consolidated individual lawsuits (an MDL) before Judge Mary M. Rowland in the Northern District of Illinois, not a single pooled case. As of the Judicial Panel’s October 1, 2026 count there were 12,381 actions pending out of 16,828 filed — fourth largest of 162 federal multidistrict proceedings.

The schedule that matters:

• April 2, 2026 — the court selected all ten bellwether trial cases itself (Dkt. 1781) rather than leaving selection to the parties, excluding cases it viewed as complicating to “cut out the noise.”
• May 5 – June 16, 2026 — defendants’ combined motion to exclude the plaintiffs’ general-causation experts was filed and fully briefed (Dkt. 1828). It is undecided, with a hearing to be set later (Dkt. 1881). Nothing matters more to value than how it comes out.
• July 24, 2026 — the discovery stay on the Second Wave defendants was lifted: “It is time to litigate” (Dkt. 1984).
• December 21, 2026 — case-specific expert discovery closes in the remaining bellwether cases (Dkt. 2016). January 11, 2027 — summary judgment and case-specific Rule 702 motions are due, with oppositions and replies in February 2027 (Dkt. 2016).

The first bellwether trial is set on the master docket for September 7, 2027. A mediator, Special Master Ellen Reisman, was appointed under Case Management Order 17, and the court has said it “always encourages” settlement discussions — an appointment and an encouragement, not a negotiation with a number attached to it.

How product-liability claim value is actually assessed

Individual claim value is not a lottery number. If you want something concrete to hold onto in place of a figure, hold onto this list — it is what the eventual figure would be built out of, and it is the part of the question you can already answer about your own file. Where a resolution structure eventually exists, claims are typically differentiated on factors like these:

Injury severity and diagnosis. The three cancers the court treats as core injuries — uterine, ovarian and endometrial — sit at the center of this litigation, and stage, spread, recurrence and survival status all bear on value. Non-cancer injuries are assessed on a different track.

Treatment. What was done, and what it cost you. Hysterectomy is the treatment fact that most often changes an assessment — particularly young, or where it ended the possibility of having children. Chemotherapy, radiation, repeat surgeries, hospitalizations and lasting complications belong in the file.

Duration and intensity of use. How often, over how many years. This is the same axis the research measured, and the axis on which exposure is proved.

Age at diagnosis. A diagnosis in a woman’s thirties carries a different lifetime picture — lost earnings, lost fertility, decades of monitoring — than the same diagnosis much later.

Documentation. The unglamorous factor that decides more claims than any other. Pathology reports, operative notes, oncology records, and a use history you can support. Claims fail on paperwork and deadlines far more often than on the merits — the court has already dismissed groups of cases with prejudice for fact-sheet non-compliance (Dkts. 1241, 1961).

None of that produces a number today. It produces the file a number would eventually be applied to.

Revlon’s bankruptcy, factually

Revlon is the one defendant with a claim structure already fixed, and it works differently from everything else here. Revlon filed for Chapter 11 protection on June 15, 2022 in the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York (case 22-10760). The proof-of-claim bar date was April 11, 2023. The reorganization plan, effective May 2, 2023, required claimants to sue in the MDL by September 14, 2023 — or, for a uterine or ovarian cancer diagnosis occurring after April 11, 2023, within six months of that diagnosis (recited in Dkt. 946 at 3).

Two consequences follow. That structure drove the surge of filings in September 2023, and it is why the November 2024 order dismissed certain post-September-2023 cancer claims with prejudice. And claims against Revlon are governed by a bankruptcy plan rather than ordinary tort timing — a separate analysis from claims against the other manufacturers, which are not in bankruptcy. If Revlon products are in your use history, raise it early.

Has anyone been paid?

No. No hair relaxer case has been tried, no verdict returned, no settlement announced. Anyone telling you payments are going out, or that a fund exists you can claim from, is describing something that is not on this docket.

How long will it take?

Longer than the marketing suggests, and the docket shows where the road goes. Expert discovery in the lead cases closes in December 2026; dispositive and expert motions are due in January 2027 and briefed through February 2027. The general-causation ruling is pending with no hearing date. The first bellwether trial is set for September 7, 2027, and only after trials — or a negotiated resolution — does any payment mechanism exist. The litigation tracker follows each docket event as it happens.

Do you qualify?

The eligibility walkthrough explains what a review looks at and what happens after. It is about two minutes, it costs nothing, and it asks nothing you have to look up first — records are requested for you, with your authorization.

What this page is not

This page is legal information, not medical advice, and it does not diagnose anything. Questions about your health belong with your own doctor.

Consultations are free and confidential, and there is no fee unless there is a recovery. Some matters may be referred to or handled with other law firms.

A claim here is against the companies that made and sold the product — not against a salon, not against whoever applied it, and not against you for having used it. Would it be wrong to find out where you stand from the one page that refused to invent a number for you? You get an answer either way, and if a settlement is ever announced, it will appear here with the order it came from.

Frequently Asked Questions

Cases are handled on a contingent-fee basis: no fee unless there is a recovery. The attorney’s fee is a percentage of the gross recovery, calculated before case expenses are deducted. Case expenses are advanced by the firm and reimbursed to the firm out of the recovery only if there is a recovery. You have no liability for court costs or litigation expenses if there is no recovery, unless a court directs otherwise.