Sophie Zavaglia: You’ve seen the commercials on TV. If you or a loved one have been exposed to asbestos or diagnosed with mesothelioma, call now. You may have heard those commercials in the background and not really known what to do with them. And then there may come a day when you get that diagnosis of mesothelioma or cancer. Maybe a loved one does. And you’re probably thinking to yourself, what do I do now? Do I even have a case? There are a lot of people who don’t make the call to a lawyer because they’re not sure about whether or not they have a case. But today on this episode, we’re going to be talking about what we at SWMW Law look for in a case and what it means to actually file a lawsuit on your behalf.
Welcome to The Asbestos Files, where we expose corporate greed, cut through the confusion, and fight for people who deserve answers. My name is Sophie Zavaglia, and I’m a lawyer at SWMW Law. At my firm, we believe that people matter and that people deserve an advocate who is willing to fight on their behalf. On today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about one of the biggest questions that we get from people who come to our firm: do I have a case?
Anytime that we get clients coming in who ask that question, we essentially have to look for two main criteria in an asbestos case. The first is that we look for any sort of diagnosed disease that we can link to asbestos. These are cancers like mesothelioma, lung cancer, esophageal cancer, and other gastrointestinal diseases. We also look for illnesses like asbestosis, which is just a medical term for lung scarring that was caused by inhaling asbestos fibers. So that’s criteria number one: there has to be a diagnosed disease that someone is suffering from. The number two requirement is some history of exposure to asbestos, or some evidence, a traceable history of exposure to asbestos.
So on this podcast already, we have talked about not only the types of industries where people can have been exposed to asbestos, but we’ve also talked about the fact that when we file a lawsuit in court, we have to provide evidence. So that is criteria number two for these cases: trying to link up how someone was exposed to asbestos and how they would have developed that asbestos-related disease.
Now, having done this work for many years, I can tell you from experience that when people come to our law firm, they are scared, they are overwhelmed. Getting an asbestos-related disease, that day of getting that diagnosis told to you by a doctor, is one of the most difficult days in a person’s life. Most of the time when people get these diagnoses, they are confused. They don’t know how they got their disease. They don’t know why they’re going through it. And then on top of it, you have to deal with things like medical bills, the prospect of getting chemotherapy, getting radiation, having your insurance company call and tell you whether or not you can even get that approved for treatment. These are all things that are incredibly overwhelming to the people that we work for.
At my firm, at SWMW Law, one of the main things that we try to tell our clients is that the last thing they ought to worry about is a lawsuit. The last thing they need to be concerned about is trying to advocate for themselves in court. That is where we come in. As lawyers, we have access to the civil justice system, and we do everything within our power to take that burden off of our clients and advocate on their behalf, and prove to a court of law how it is that they or their loved one was exposed to asbestos, and why it is that the companies who exposed them deserve to be held accountable for that exposure. It simply is not fair that individuals have to shoulder the burden of an illness, and specifically of cancer, all on their own when it wasn’t their fault to begin with. And that is what motivates everything that we do at this law firm.
You might also be wondering what happens if the companies that exposed me no longer exist. The reality is that happens a lot in this litigation. Because asbestos was most highly used in the 1960s and the 1970s and through the ’80s, a lot of companies over time have gone out of business. But there are also a lot of companies that have gone bankrupt and set up what are called bankruptcy trusts. That’s one of the many ways that we can get our clients paid: by going through those bankruptcy trusts. There are many, many companies who have set aside millions of dollars in trust funds that people can access if they know how to access that, and that comes back to having a lawyer who knows how the system works and knows the right places to look to apply for compensation and to try and get people made whole from being exposed to asbestos.
You might also be wondering, what if I don’t know how I was exposed? Maybe your doctor told you, look, you’ve got this asbestos-related disease, you have mesothelioma, you have scarring of the lungs, you have lung cancer, but you may not know how you were exposed. The reality is that most people who come through our doors and have cases, they don’t know in the beginning how they were exposed. All that they know is what they did for work, where they worked over time. And that’s where our expertise comes in. We have a combined experience at my firm of over a century of litigation experience, doing specifically asbestos litigation and getting to know the corporate history of a countless number of companies that made asbestos-containing products. We use that knowledge and we conduct the investigation. We know where to look for information. We talk to coworkers. We work with unions. We go through records. We have our own product databases that we comb through. The point being, you don’t have to have all the answers; that is where our experience comes in, and it’s our job to try and piece that puzzle together about how you may have been exposed by talking to you and doing the investigation work.
You might also be wondering what a consultation looks like. What does it look like to even call a lawyer? At my firm, we do our very best to make it as easy as possible. This should not be another one of your points of stress that you’re dealing with when you’re sick or when you’re dealing with a loved one that’s sick. Our consultations are free. They will always be free. We can come to you or talk to you over the phone and tell you a little bit more about our firm and what we might be able to do for you. We’ll also ask you questions about where you or your loved one worked, what jobs you held over time, and try to assess with you whether or not you have a case. We can’t possibly know, and we can’t make any promises, but we can’t know until we talk. That is part of what motivates me, certainly, and I know the other attorneys at my firm as well: we believe that information is power, and we want you to be as well equipped as possible with all the information so that we can make a decision about whether or not you have a case and how strong that case may be. At that point, once you have the information, it’s in your hands to decide whether you go forward, and we’re here to help you make that decision.
Now shifting gears, we’re going to do Ask Sophie, where we answer your questions about either what I do as a litigation attorney, or about asbestos cases in general, or what questions you may have about the whole field of asbestos. The first question I’m going to answer today is: my father worked in a shipyard in the 1970s and was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. Does he have a case?
As we’ve talked about on this episode, one of the first things that we look for at my law firm is whether there is an actual injury, some sort of disease that we can prove was exposed to asbestos: things like mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, esophageal cancer, or other types of cancers that we can link up based on the science. Looking at the question as it is right now, we have one of those criteria: a diagnosis of lung cancer. It doesn’t matter if this person’s dad was a smoker, for example; as long as we have that diagnosis that we can tie, based on the science and the medical literature, to exposure to asbestos, we’ve met criteria number one. The second criteria is looking for whether or not we can prove that disease was caused by exposure to asbestos, which we’d do by talking to this person or their father. Just looking at the question itself, the father working at a shipyard, that’s one of the dirtiest places to work in this country; there are all sorts of equipment and products and component parts that would have contained asbestos in shipyards. And the timeframe of the 1970s is right in the window where there were very few regulations nationwide about asbestos, since the 1970s is when OSHA was enacted.
So my answer to this question is: maybe. On the face of it, it sounds like there may be something we could investigate, but that’s why it’s so critically important to have this person, or their father, actually talk to an attorney who does asbestos litigation. We know the right questions to ask. That’s really important, because we’re going to have to ask you things about the products and equipment that was used; we have records, and that’s part of our job. In fact, that’s almost all of our job: taking that burden away from you of having all the answers. You don’t need to know the answers. That’s our job, to ask you the right questions and know how that equipment in the shipyards was used, how things were handled, and what kind of records we could even request to find out more. So for this writer, make sure you talk to a lawyer who knows what they’re doing, specifically somebody who handles asbestos-related cases.
Another question that someone wrote in with is: we can’t afford a lawyer, how can I retain you, how does this work? The reality of this litigation is that the vast majority of the people we work for cannot afford lawyers; they cannot afford to pay someone several hundred dollars an hour to litigate their case. That is why we don’t charge fees like that. There is something called a contingency fee, which means we don’t get paid unless you get paid. There is no upfront cost. You don’t have to pay to talk to us, and again, we only get paid if we get a settlement for you or for your family member.
So if you’re at all pausing, if you’re not reaching out to a lawyer because you’re worried about how much it’s going to cost, especially in this economy, when everything is rising and it is very hard right now: being afraid of having to pay a lawyer should not be a reason that you don’t make that call to find out more if you or your family member have been diagnosed. Certainly with our law firm, there is no fee to talk to us, it’s always free, and we can give you the real answers that you’re looking for with no obligation to pay us at the end of it. So don’t let that hesitate you from reaching out to someone who knows what they’re doing.
That’s it for today’s episode of The Asbestos Files. If any of this sounds familiar to you, or if you have had a diagnosis, or you suspect you might have been exposed to asbestos, or if you just have a question about how any of this works, please get in touch. We’ve got our contact information in the show notes, and you can also visit our website at swmwlaw.com. I really appreciate you listening today. I’m Sophie Zavaglia, and at SWMW we believe people matter. Thanks for listening.
