$1.2 Billion Global Settlement for 98 Victims of the Champlain Towers South Collapse

At approximately 1:22 a.m. on June 24, 2021, the north wing of Champlain Towers South, a 12-story oceanfront condominium in Surfside, Florida, pancaked. The south wing followed minutes later. When search-and-rescue operations ended, 98 people were confirmed dead, most of them inside units they had gone to sleep in the night before.

Litigation began within weeks. Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Michael Hanzman consolidated the claims and appointed separate counsel to represent distinct classes of plaintiffs. Judd Rosen of Goldberg and Rosen was appointed to lead the class consisting of renters, guests, and the families of those killed, a group with no property interest in the building and whose losses were entirely personal. Judge Hanzman separated unit owners, who had property damage claims, into a parallel track so that the unit-owner settlement pool would not compete with the funds available to wrongful death families.

Over the course of the litigation, the legal team identified multiple liable parties. Securitas Security Services, the contract guard company on duty the night of the collapse, settled for $517.5 million after evidence showed the on-site guard had not activated the building's in-unit voice alarm despite being present in the final minutes before the collapse and had not been trained on how to use it. Insurers for the Terra-led development team behind the neighboring Eighty Seven Park luxury tower, whose excavation and construction was alleged to have destabilized Champlain Towers South, contributed approximately $400 million. Additional funds came from the building engineer Morabito Consultants, the condo association's law firm Becker and Poliakoff, and the Town of Surfside.

A tentative settlement of $997 million was announced in May 2022. As the Champlain Towers South property itself was sold through a court-supervised auction and additional mediated claims were resolved, the total climbed past $1 billion and ultimately reached approximately $1.2 billion by the time Judge Hanzman granted final approval. Rosen described the result publicly as the largest settlement from a single incident in U.S. history at the time of the initial announcement.

Distribution to the families of the 98 victims and to injured survivors was administered through a court-supervised receivership. Payments began in fall 2022, roughly 16 months after the collapse.