25 Years of Mesothelioma Litigation
The first litigation involving an asbestos product took place in Beaumont, Texas in December 1966. A former asbestos worker filed the lawsuit against eleven defendants, including Johns-Manville and Owens-Corning, two large producers of asbestos products. The case was an asbestosis case and involved the concept of "failure to warn", a primary factor in asbestos lawsuits. Of the eleven defendants, only five agreed to an out-of-court settlement.
It was in October of 1969 when asbestos victims were able to obtain victory in mesothelioma litigation and which ignited a chain of legal events for victims for years to come. A colleague of the 1966 plaintiff filed suit against the same defendants, only he was suffering from advanced mesothelioma. Four of the defendants, settled with the plaintiff's estate before the start of the trial in September 1970.
It was during that trial that the accident prevention manager for Johns-Manville testified that he hadn't heard of dangers of asbestos before 1964, when Dr. Irving Selikoff presented a paper on the topic to the New York Academy of Sciences, meaning the corporation shouldn't be held liable for asbestos exposure injuries before that time. The jury found favor to the plaintiff for this case, although ignorance before 1964 proved successful for defendants against the "failure to warn" argument for the following few years.
However, in 1977, discovery was made that revealed supposed corporate conspiracy and violation of laws. A plaintiff's lawyer representing former employees of Raybestos-Manhattan discovered a passage in the company's annual report suggesting that forty years earlier, Raybestos-Manhattan hired a renowned insurance company to assess its factories and make suggestions for the health and injury hazards of employees.
After having the court issue a subpoena to the insurance company's CEO, he acknowledged their commissioned laboratory studying the harmful effects of asbestos. Findings from the study were tucked away in an office storage closet for almost 40 years. Named after the insurance company's founder, the documents came to be known as the Sumner Simpson Papers. They served as evidence of the asbestos industry's deliberate conspiracy to hide and falsify information about the dangers of asbestos. The outcome of these discoveries was the surge of mesothelioma lawsuits ongoing for more than 25 years and still continuing today.