The killer, Stephen Paddock, holed up inside his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, which MGM owns, and then fired into the crowd at a country music festival below. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
One of the lawyers for the victims, Robert Eglet, said Thursday the settlement would resolve “substantially all” of the lawsuits and claims against MGM related to the massacre.
Another lawyer for the plaintiffs, Craig Eiland, said that the settlement was expected to cover up to 4,500 people, which he said would include everything “from death cases all the way down to those who had PTSD.”
An independent claims administrator will review medical bills and other expenses, as well as the circumstances of each victim, before deciding how much each person will receive.
It was not immediately known whether any of the victims who have filed claims will opt out of the settlement and instead take their cases to trial.
At first, MGM responded with an aggressive legal strategy when claims poured in from the injured and the relatives of the dead, who accused the company of negligence in allowing Paddock to stockpile high-powered rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition in his hotel room.
It had sought to block victims from recovering any money from the company, arguing that a little-known federal law passed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks meant that MGM enjoyed a shield from liability because the shooting qualified as an “act of terrorism” under the law’s expansive definitions.
As part of its strategy, MGM sued more than 1,000 people who had already filed cases or indicated an intent to pursue claims against the company.
Though the company’s lawsuits did not seek any money, the strategy stirred anger against MGM.
All of the settlement — or nearly all — will be funded by MGM’s insurers, who have agreed to pay $751 million to resolve the cases. So the most MGM will have to pay out of its own pockets, depending on the final settlement amount, would be $49 million.
This article originally appeared in
.