Bilott is known for the lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of plaintiffs injured by chemical waste dumped in rural communities in West Virginia.

Bilott's litigation was the foundation for his memoir titled Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont (2019).

The 2018 documentary The Devil We Know and the 2019 feature film Dark Waters drew attention to his legal battles with Dupont and the hazards of these chemicals.

PFOA was unregulated by EPA, and the industry had never reported the results of its internal studies showing it to be hazardous to humans and animals.

In August 2001, Bilott filed a class action lawsuit against DuPont on behalf of the approximately 70,000 people in West Virginia and Ohio with PFOA-contaminated drinking water.

[1] Because tens of thousands of people in the affected districts agreed to have their blood tested for the presence of PFOA, the independent scientific panel jointly selected by the parties (but required under the settlement to be paid for by DuPont) took years to analyze and process the results.

[9] In 2018, Bilott was appointed by the federal court in South Carolina overseeing all cases filed across the United States for harm caused by PFAS in aqueous fire fighting foam to serve as national “Advisory Counsel” to the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee overseeing all that consolidated multi-district litigation (the “AFFF MDL”).

[12] Bilott was also part of the legal team that settled PFAS claims by the State of Ohio against DuPont- related companies for $110 million in 2024.

[15] Bilott's work was also featured in extensive articles in The Huffington Post ("Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg") and The Intercept (multi-part "The Teflon Toxin" series).

Robert Bilott wrote the memoir Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont, first published in English in 2019 by Atria Books.

It is also the subject of the "Toxic Waters" episode of the multi-part feature documentary, Parched, which aired on the National Geographic TV channel in 2017.

[23] Bilott wrote the foreword of the book Forever Chemicals Environmental, Economic, and Social Equity Concerns with PFAS in the Environment (2021),[24] by David M. Kempisty and Leeann Racz, published in 2021 by CRC Press.

He also wrote the foreword to PFAS – The Eternal and Invisible Pollutants in the Water: Stories of Denied Rights and Active Citizenship, a book published in Italy in 2024.

[27] In 2017, Bilott received the international Right Livelihood Award, also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize", for his decades of work on PFAS chemical contamination issues.