Congress Holds Hearing On Asbestos Litigation

In Congress yesterday a House Judiciary Committee held hearings on alleged abuses in absestos litigation involving forum shopping, witness coaching, fraudulent diagnoses and double dipping as reported by Alison Frankel for Thomson Reuters.

In regard to double dipping by which some plaintiffs allegedly are receiving multiple recoveries for the same injury from different sources Dionne Searcey from The Wall Street Journal Law Blog writes:

Defense attorneys have long claimed that plaintiffs double dip and get inflated payouts by filing multiple asbestos claims, both in court and with asbestos trusts, for the same injury. Because settlements are secret and the trusts aren't required to make public their payouts, it's difficult to verify whether claimants are getting overpaid.

Perhaps the most damning testimony at the hearing came from law professor Lester Brickman who assailed the U.S. Department of Justice for failing to investigate alleged instances of fraudulent diagnoses pursuant to mass screenings for asbestos injuries which undermines the integrity of the legal system as reported by Samuel Knight for Main Justice.

Effectively, what law enforcement agencies have done by their inaction is grant lawyers and the medical personnel they hire a special dispensation to commit fraud on a massive scale in certain mass tort litigations. * * * This failure of law enforcement and the resultant imprimatur given to the perpetration of mass tort fraud should not be allowed to stand unchallenged.

My father is a 96 year old retired pipefitter. He was diagnosed with an asbestos related lung condition that really presents no outward impairment that the layman would notice. He get around, no oxygenEvery few months, it seems, he gets a letter from a law firm announcing a new settlement in the sum of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The defendants have included Babcock and Wilcox, Halliburton, Pfizer (?), Johns-Mansville, and Electric Boat. He worked in commercial construction around Western New York. Many of these companies had no presence in the area.

Everyone who has worked in an industrial or construction setting has been exposed to asbestos at some time or another, including myself. Suing companies out of existence for threats that they could not conceive at the time is completely ridiculous. Does anybody realize how many companies were destroyed by this? All over a naturally occuring mineral?

And the asbestos implicated in that extremely rare form of cancer (average of about 4 deaths per year) is amphibole asbestos (short hard fibers), rarely encountered by any and rarely used in anything, not chrysotile asbestos (long fluffier fibers), one of the most commonly encountered minerals in the environment. Congress failed to make a distinction between them and, because of this, greedy effing bastards of attorneys started destroying companies over something, chrysotile asbestos, that is not dangerous.

For instance, San Francisco has so much naturally occurring asbestos that if it had, as a city, to comply with EPA/OSHA regulations, it would have to shut down. But there are no higher rates of lung disease associated with that asbestos. The city of Asbestos in Canada has so much asbestos in the air that it can be swept off porches, but it has no higher rates of lung disease associated with that asbestos.

The asbestos litigation industry and the asbestos abatement industry are both scams perpetrated on the public because Congress failed to make a distinction between different types of asbestos.

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