Erin Brockovich

Erin Brockovich is one of the most recognizable figures in the history of American environmental activism — a woman with no legal degree who helped construct a case that forced Pacific Gas & Electric into a $333 million settlement, the largest ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in United States history at the time. Born in Lawrence, Kansas, and trained in business at Wade College in Dallas, she became a legal clerk at the Capleton, California firm of Masry & Vititoe after a car accident left her in financial hardship. There, she uncovered evidence of hexavalent chromium contamination in the groundwater of Hinkley, California, tied to a PG&E compressor station — and spent years building a case that would go on to affect more than 630 plaintiffs. The 2000 film depicting her story, starring Julia Roberts in an Oscar-winning performance, brought her fight to a global audience and established her as a permanent symbol of individual tenacity against institutional power.

Human rights speaker Erin Brockovich did not stop in Hinkley. She went on to participate in additional contamination cases involving Whitman Corporation chromium pollution in Willits, California, and a $335 million settlement involving more than 1,200 plaintiffs near another PG&E pipeline site in Kings County. She serves as a consultant to Weitz & Luxenberg, one of the country’s leading personal injury and environmental litigation firms, and to Shine Lawyers in Australia. As president of Brockovich Research & Consulting, she has spent decades working across the United States and internationally on groundwater contamination, oil spills, fracking, PFAS and forever chemicals, medical device injuries, and pharmaceutical harms — connecting affected communities to legal resources, scientific expertise, and public attention.

Still in the Fight: Water, PFAS, and Corporate Accountability

Brockovich’s activism has only grown more urgent in recent years. She was among the first advocates to respond to the 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, traveling to the community within weeks to help residents understand their rights and the potential long-term contamination risks. She has held town halls across multiple states on PFAS contamination — the class of synthetic “forever chemicals” now found in nearly half of the nation’s tap water — and has written for the New York Times on the erosion of EPA regulatory power and what it means for public health. She executive produced the 2024 documentary Unearth, which follows activists fighting a proposed open-pit gold and copper mine threatening Alaska’s Bristol Bay. She founded Community Healthbook, an online platform enabling individuals to map and share environmental and health concerns in their communities.

As a speaker, Erin Brockovich brings something no policy brief or corporate ESG report can replicate: lived experience of what happens when institutions fail ordinary people, and the credibility of someone who forced accountability at the highest level. Her keynotes are delivered with a directness and warmth that corporate audiences find rare on the conference circuit. She speaks not to shame organizations but to challenge them — to understand what genuine accountability, transparency, and community trust look like in practice, and why the companies and leaders who embrace those values consistently outperform those who avoid them.