A History of Asbestos Law
How asbestos attorneys have shaped the fight to win justice and compensation for asbestos victims.
Knowledge of asbestos’ danger goes back two millennia before the advent of modern asbestos law and asbestos attorneys. In the first century AD, Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder noticed a high incidence of “lung sickness” in quarry slaves and advised his fellow citizens against purchasing them, as they tended to die young.
By the mid-1920s, the U.S. asbestos industry had already settled its first asbestosis claim. From the 1920s to the 1960s, asbestos settlements were resolved without courts or asbestos attorneys, and were instead filed and resolved as worker’s compensation claims where they were able to be kept secret as an internal company matter.
By the 1930s asbestos industry executives and their insurance companies were fully aware that asbestos was killing its workers at an alarming rate. Asbestos manufacturers commissioned numerous internal studies to determine exactly how toxic their product was. The results became so predictably bad that over time, the companies ditched their studies and adopted a strategy of admit no wrong and deny all liability. They also made the fateful calculation that they could make more money selling profitable asbestos products than they would have to pay out in worker’s compensation claims.
The asbestos industry’s abuse of the labor force and the American public might have gone on for many more decades if not for two factors: the rise of asbestos law and asbestos attorney and the fact that the exceptionally long lag time between asbestos exposure and full blown disease (up to 40 years) was coming to fruition.
Enter the asbestos attorney
“...if you have enjoyed a good life while working with asbestos products, why not die from it. There’s got to be some cause.” - A 1966 Bendix Corporation (now Honeywell) letter
“…few people were aware that [the 1982 Manville] bankruptcy filing was simply the latest episode in a fifty-year history of corporate malfeasance and inhumanity to man that is unparalleled in the annals of the private-enterprise system.” - Paul Brodeur, Outrageous Misconduct
In the early 1960s, the cracks started showing in the asbestos industry’s carefully crafted conspiracy of silence. One major reason for this turn of events was the tendency of asbestos corporate executives to keep incriminating documents for posterity, including letters and internal memos which proved that the industry had known since the 1930s that asbestos was killing its workers. It was these documents that helped asbestos lawyers convince juries to punish the companies that had willfully exposed its workers to asbestos.
In 1964, Dr. Irving Selikoff established a definitive link between the inhalation of asbestos fibers and lung-related diseases. Selikoff’s landmark report became the baseline for official knowledge of the dangers of asbestos by the asbestos companies. For years after the report was released, asbestos companies claimed they first learned of the links between asbestos exposure and respiratory illnesses from Dr. Selikoff, a lie that was to be proven untrue over and over again by asbestos attorneys representing the industry’s victims.
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The first asbestos attorney
In 1966, Ward Stephenson, a personal injury attorney from Orange Texas became the first asbestos attorney when he filed the first asbestos lawsuit on behalf of his client, Claude Tomplait, a former asbestos insulation installer who had developed asbestosis as a result of his work. Stephenson built a meticulous case against the asbestos companies by proving that they had known all along that asbestos was harmful, but had failed to warn their workers. “Failure to warn” has been the basis of most asbestos and mesothelioma lawsuits since.
The next asbestos lawyer to make a major leap in asbestos litigation was Karl Asch. It was Asch who found a major discrepancy in a 1974 Raybestos-Manhattan annual report that led to the discovery of the most famous papers in asbestos litigation – the letters now known as the Sumner-Simpson papers. The papers detailed how Raybestos, Johns-Manville, and other asbestos manufacturers conspired to find out about the hazards of asbestos, craft strategies to deal with them, and then keep that knowledge from their workers and the public. Asch was the first asbestos attorney to introduce these incriminating documents in court and he did so with great success. He is credited with precipitating today’s massive asbestos litigation wave that is helping to bring justice to thousands of asbestos victims.
Asbestos litigation goes big-time
Prior to (and concurrent with) the growing successes that asbestos attorneys were having on behalf of their clients, many of the asbestos companies were escaping full-fledged litigation by quietly paying out small settlements to their victims. But starting in the 1970s, the trickle of mesothelioma lawsuits had turned into an avalanche. Thanks to overwhelming evidence from the asbestos companies themselves, asbestos attorneys were having little difficulty convincing juries to award large punitive asbestos settlements, thereby ending the quiet payouts and opening the door to larger and more just mesothelioma settlements.
The nail that the asbestos attorneys drove into the asbestos industry’s coffin was the 1982 Manville Corporation (formerly Johns-Manville) bankruptcy filing. For decades J-M was the top asbestos producer in the United States. It was also the one of the largest industrial corporations in the US, with assets of over $2 billion. Faced with a tsunami of asbestos lawsuits estimated to be in the billions of dollars, Manville took the bold step of filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy on August 26, 1982. What this did was effectively halt the asbestos lawsuits being filed by its former workers, made sick with mesothelioma and other respiratory diseases, which were coming in at the rate of 500 new cases a month.
As litigation brought about by asbestos attorneys heated up in the 1980s, asbestos companies saw more and more of their sensitive internal documents made public. In 1988, an asbestos trust employee wrote in a memo: "there are so many embarrassing documents that people disagree as to which group of any ten documents is the worst."
Asbestos attorneys and the asbestos bankruptcy trusts
The Manville bankruptcy was resolved in 1982 with the formation of The Manville Trust. The first of many asbestos bankruptcy trusts, the Manville Trust was set up to pay asbestos settlements out to claimants in a relatively orderly way. Since 1987, the asbestos trusts have paid out asbestos settlements, including mesothelioma settlements, to hundreds of thousands of asbestos victims with the help of asbestos attorneys.
The Fairness in Asbestos Compensation Act was introduced in 1999 to help sort out the massive jumble of asbestos cases being filed by unscrupulous asbestos attorneys on behalf of non-impaired workers or those with non-malignant diseases such as mesothelioma cancer. These cases were clogging the legal system and diluting payouts for those with life-threatening asbestos-related diseases.
While the asbestos trust system is not perfect, it has paid out billions of dollars to the victims of the short-sighted and conscienceless asbestos companies that took away their livelihoods and lives. Today, asbestos law has evolved to a point where those who have been affected by an asbestos-related disease such as malignant mesothelioma will be safely and legally protected and compensated.
Asbestos attorneys are here to help you
While it has been streamlined, asbestos litigation is still complex and often confusing. If you or someone close to you has been affected by an asbestos-related disease, don’t wait to file a claim. An asbestos attorney can help you navigate the complexities of asbestos law to get the asbestos settlement your family needs to help pay their expenses, including medical bills.
Although nothing can ever truly compensate for loss of health or life, our asbestos attorneys are devoted to getting you the justice you deserve.