Sophie Zavaglia: Asbestos was used in thousands of products for decades, in everything from construction materials to brakes and clutches to industrial materials, and even consumer products like hairdryers. Companies have known since the late 1800s that asbestos posed a risk to human health. In spite of knowing this risk, they acted for decades to try to cover up the threat of asbestos. And now asbestos is the subject of one of the longest-running mass torts in American legal history. Many victims of asbestos exposure don’t even know that they have a case. By the end of this episode, you’re going to understand how asbestos lawsuits work, and you’re going to have a better understanding of what even makes a case good in court.
Welcome to The Asbestos Files, where we expose corporate greed, cut through the confusion, and fight for people who demand answers. My name is Sophie Zavaglia. I’m an attorney at SWMW Law, and at my firm we believe that when companies put profits over safety, people deserve an advocate in their corner who’s willing to fight. Today we’re talking about asbestos lawsuits. So let’s talk about it: what is asbestos?
Asbestos is actually a mineral that is mined out of the ground. It’s a naturally occurring mineral that does a lot of really great things, and that’s why asbestos was used in the first place. Asbestos is really good at protecting humans from the effect of heat. What people learned over a thousand years ago is that if you put asbestos into cloth, for example, you can prevent burning in an individual. Because of this, and because asbestos is also really good at extending the lifespan of a lot of different products, asbestos became widely used starting in the 20th century, but especially in the 1950s and the 1960s. All told, asbestos was used in over 3,000 unique types of products in the United States, so it was basically everywhere: joint compounds, insulation that went on pipes, brakes, clutches, anything where there’s heat. In other words, asbestos was used.
And that is one of the things that made asbestos great: it can protect human health. But one of the drawbacks that the industry began to find out, and what doctors began to find out as early as the 1930s, is that even though it’s really good at protecting people against getting burned, breathing in the individual asbestos fibers can cause things like breathing problems, lung scarring, and even cancer.
One of the things that also makes asbestos especially dangerous, or especially scary, is that it can take anywhere from 20 to 50 years after the first time you’re exposed to actually become sick. So people may not even know that they’re being exposed to asbestos, and come to find out 20 or 30 years down the road that they now have a disease caused by this mineral.
Certain types of conditions that are caused by breathing in asbestos fibers are things like mesothelioma, which is an extremely rare form of cancer that develops in the lining of the lungs. It’s a little different than normal lung cancer, and that’s what makes it so rare; there are only a couple thousand cases of mesothelioma diagnosed in the United States every year. Breathing in asbestos fibers can also cause regular lung cancer, asbestosis, which is scarring of the lungs, and there’s also medical science to support that things like esophageal cancer can be caused by exposure to asbestos. I don’t tell you any of this to scare you or to make this scarier than it needs to be, but unfortunately this is the reality of what happens when people inhale asbestos without realizing that it can cause these diseases.
Someone who has developed an illness like this, a cancer or lung scarring, might ask themselves: what now? What options are available to me? And that’s essentially what we do at my law firm: we file lawsuits. Here’s generally the life of a lawsuit when it comes to asbestos exposure. When people contact us, they are already struggling with some form of cancer or breathing problem. Once we find out what condition that person has, we do an investigation about how the individual was exposed to asbestos.
Because asbestos-related diseases don’t develop until 20 to 50 years after the first exposure, a lot of what we do is actually like an investigation. It’s a historical analysis, going back in time and trying to figure out how this individual was exposed to asbestos. The way we do that: if the person is alive, we talk to them about what jobs they had, where they worked over time, what products they used. We talk to coworkers, we talk to family members. We do a deep dive into that person’s entire working life to try to figure out what types of products they were exposed to. And based on our experience as a law firm, having already done this investigation countless other times, we’re able to cross-reference what that individual did with all of the information we have within our system, built up over many years, about what products companies made, how they were used, and how they exposed people to asbestos. Once we’ve finished that investigation, we file a lawsuit.
That is why it matters what type of law firm you retain in a case like this. At my firm, SWMW Law, we fight until the very end. We do not give up, and we fight to get as much compensation as possible for our clients, up through and including actually trying the case. We have an entire team of lawyers who have experience vetting these claims and fighting in court, which we are not only willing to do, but we enjoy doing. Lawsuits take a long time, and you need somebody in your corner who is willing to stick it out and fight until it’s done.
Most cases, and this is the reality of this litigation, settle before going to trial, and I can talk more about that in another episode. Just to give you a preview: companies don’t want these cases in court. They’re afraid of these cases. But we are willing to try the case, and if the case needs to be tried, that’s what we’re willing to do. We exhaust all options available to our clients.
Now we’re going to switch gears and do one of our recurring segments, asbestos myth versus fact. I’m going to talk to you about some myths people believe about asbestos and asbestos litigation, and what the reality is behind whatever that myth is.
The first myth I want to talk about today is that asbestos lawsuits are frivolous. There is so much in the media about runaway juries, about fraudulent plaintiffs, that all you need to do to make money is just file a lawsuit and you’ll become a millionaire. The reality is that asbestos lawsuits, like any other lawsuit filed in court, have a standard of proof that we as a plaintiff’s firm have to meet. It’s not enough that we just file a lawsuit; we actually have to come with the evidence. And that is what we do: we gather that evidence and we back up our claims. Everything in court has to be backed up by fact, by evidence, by testimony, and by documents, and that is what we do day in and day out: gather all of those materials to prove our clients’ claims.
Another asbestos myth: you have to be a factory worker in order to have a case. The reality is that asbestos was used in over 3,000 different types of products over the last century. There are all types of industries, jobs, and settings where people could have been exposed to asbestos, so it’s not just that you have to be a factory worker. People in the military have been exposed, in industrial settings, in factories, in automotive repair shops, and asbestos can actually affect people who live in the same home as workers who worked with the materials themselves. Asbestos does not discriminate. It doesn’t care what your job title is, it doesn’t care what your gender is, it doesn’t care what your race is or how much money you make a year. What ultimately matters is whether asbestos got into your lungs, and that can happen a lot of different ways.
Another asbestos myth: it’s probably too late to file my case. You might be thinking that if you do have a case, you’re worried that you might not have filed on time. In the practice of law, there’s a concept called the statute of limitations, which is basically a legal term meaning you only have a certain amount of time to file a lawsuit before it’s too late. The reality is that because asbestos takes anywhere from 20 to 50 years to actually cause a disease, some people don’t even know they have a case; they might not even know until well after they’ve been diagnosed with a cancer. That’s one reason why it’s so important to speak to a lawyer who does this type of litigation. Every single state in the country has a different statute of limitations, a different deadline to file a case, so it’s important that you talk to a lawyer who knows these statutes of limitation and can advise you about whether or not it’s too late to file a claim.
In some of what we do, we’ve even filed lawsuits on behalf of people who have passed away, and their family members learn later that their cancer was caused by asbestos. That is the type of expertise that we bring to the table. And that’s why it’s really important that if you think you might have a case, you call a lawyer and talk to them as soon as you can, because that clock does begin to run as soon as you realize that you’ve been injured in some way.
That’s it for today’s episode of The Asbestos Files. If you or someone that you know has been affected by an asbestos-related illness, please reach out. We would love to connect. You can reach us at the information in the show notes, or you can visit us at swmwlaw.com. We believe that people matter. I’m Sophie Zavaglia, and I appreciate you listening.
