Institutional abuse litigation runs on a single idea: an organization that takes custody of children owes them a duty of care, and when it ignores that duty at scale, it pays at scale. Everything else (revival windows, bankruptcy trusts, bulk settlements) is machinery built around that idea.
The active fronts
Same settlement, different facts
LA County foster care
Foster and group home placements, and MacLaren Children’s Center, are covered by the same County agreements. The evidence is different, placement records rather than detention logs, but the duty and the claims process are the same.
Final · distributions ongoing
Boy Scouts of America
The $2.4 billion bankruptcy plan survived its last challenge in January 2026 when the Supreme Court declined to review it, rejecting an appeal from roughly 75 survivors who argued it wrongly blocks them from suing chartering organizations.
Active · new filings & bankruptcies
Catholic dioceses
Still generating new filings across multiple states, driven by revival windows, and by new Chapter 11 filings in response, each of which sets a bar date that can extinguish claims faster than any statute of limitations.
Active in multiple states
Juvenile detention nationwide
Claims against state and county youth facilities in Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey and elsewhere. Each turns on that state’s sovereign immunity rules, damages caps, and notice deadlines.
How institutional liability actually works
Suing the person who abused you is usually pointless in a practical sense. Individual abusers are frequently dead, imprisoned, judgment-proof, or unidentifiable decades later. Institutional claims exist because the organization that put you in the room is a different defendant with different assets and a different duty. That distinction is the whole reason a civil case reaches further than a prosecution.
The four theories that carry most cases
- Negligent hiring. The organization did not screen, or ignored what screening turned up: a prior complaint, a prior termination, a criminal record.
- Negligent supervision and retention. The organization received a complaint, or observed conduct, and responded by moving the person rather than removing them. This is the theory that has produced the largest verdicts, because the paper trail is usually internal and devastating.
- Negligent failure to protect. The organization had no functioning system: no background checks, no two-adult rule, no reporting path a child could actually use, no supervision of overnight or one-on-one contact.
- Fiduciary or special relationship duty. Some relationships (custodian and child, school and student, church and parishioner) carry a heightened duty that goes beyond ordinary negligence.
A common misconception is that you must show a specific executive knew about your specific abuse. In most states you do not. What matters is whether the risk was foreseeable and the institution’s response was unreasonable, and prior complaints about the same person, unit, or facility from other claimants can establish that without any reference to you.
Three mechanisms that decide these cases
1. Revival windows
More than twenty states have passed laws that reopen expired childhood sexual abuse claims for a limited period. California’s AB 218, New York’s Child Victims Act and Adult Survivors Act, and Maryland’s Child Victims Act are the best known. Every mass institutional case of the last decade traces back to one of these laws. They are also the reason timing matters more here than in almost any other kind of litigation. Windows close, and some have already closed. See our state-by-state deadline reference.
2. Bankruptcy and the bar date
When an institution cannot pay what it owes, it files Chapter 11. That immediately stops every individual lawsuit and replaces them with a single claims process supervised by a bankruptcy court. Claimants must file by a court-set deadline called a bar date. Miss it and your claim is generally gone permanently, regardless of what your state’s statute of limitations says. The Boy Scouts case and dozens of diocesan cases have all run through this machinery.
3. Aggregate settlement
When a defendant faces thousands of claims at once, individual trials become impossible and both sides negotiate a single number covering everyone. Aggregate settlements resolve claims quickly relative to trial, but they produce no findings, no public record, and no individual accountability, and the allocation of the money among claimants happens in a separate administrative process that can take years. Read more in settlements and compensation.
Questions we are asked most
An institutional claim is brought against the organization that had custody or supervisory responsibility, not only against the individual who committed the abuse. The theory is negligence by the institution: negligent hiring, negligent supervision, failure to respond to prior complaints, or failure to have basic safeguards in place. This matters practically because institutions have insurance and assets, while individual abusers usually have neither.
Actual knowledge helps enormously, but most states do not require it. The usual standard is whether the harm was foreseeable and whether the institution acted reasonably. An organization that never screened staff, never trained anyone on reporting, and had no mechanism for a child to report anything can be liable even without proof that any specific executive knew about any specific incident.
Bankruptcy stops individual lawsuits and channels all claims into a single trust with a strict filing deadline called a bar date. Miss the bar date and your claim is generally extinguished permanently, even if your state's statute of limitations had years left. This is why diocesan and Boy Scouts claimants had to move quickly, and why anyone with a claim against a struggling institution should not wait.
They are different rather than uniformly harder. Government defendants have sovereign immunity protections, damages caps in some states, and short notice-of-claim deadlines that can be as brief as six months. But some states have specifically waived those protections for childhood sexual abuse. California's AB 218 removed the government claim presentation requirement entirely, which is precisely how the Los Angeles County claims became viable.
- Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors settlement approvals, April 2025 and October 2025.
- In re Boy Scouts of America, bankruptcy plan confirmation and subsequent appellate history; U.S. Supreme Court denial of certiorari, January 2026.
- California Assembly Bill 218 (2019); New York Child Victims Act (2019) and Adult Survivors Act (2022); Maryland Child Victims Act (2023).
- The Schroeder Firm, abuse and institutional liability practice.
