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 on Thursday the settlement would be in the range of $735 million to $800 million and would resolve “substantially all” of the lawsuits and claims against MGM related to the massacre.
“While nothing will be able to bring back the lives lost or undo the horrors so many suffered on that day, this settlement will provide fair compensation for thousands of victims and their families,” Mr. Eglet said in a statement, adding that the deal “represents good corporate citizenship on” the part of MGM.
The company had at first responded with an aggressive legal strategy when claims poured in from the injured and the relatives of the dead, who accused MGM of negligence in allowing Mr. 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.
Because of that — and also because a security firm hired for the concert possessed a special designation from the Department of Homeland Security — MGM argued that its interpretation of the law meant that it should not have to pay damage claims to injured concertgoers. The federal law is known as the Support Antiterrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies Act, or Safety Act.
As part of its strategy to have the company declared immune from liability by funneling cases to a federal court where that issue could be litigated, 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.
The settlement closely tracks the contours of a deal that MGM said in May was a “reasonably possible” outcome from mediation with the plaintiffs.