In 2014, the Texas State Supreme Court affirmed an appeals court decision overturning a judgment against Georgia Pacific in a mesothelioma case. The high court declared that “proof of ‘any exposure’ to a defendant’s product will not suffice” to establish liability, that “the dose must be quantified,” and that “the plaintiff must establish that the defendant’s product was a substantial factor in causing the plaintiff’s disease.”
In 2017, GP was restructured. A former division, Bestwall Gypsum, became a separate entity and filed for bankruptcy in North Carolina.
Decades earlier, GP/Bestwall had manufactured and sold a product that represented less than 2 percent of all asbestos-containing products manufactured and sold in the country.
As companies making more prevalent, more toxic asbestos products were sued and bankrupted, however, GP/Bestwall became a target of last resort.
“The massive increase in the number of claims against, and the size of the plaintiffs’ settlement demands to, Bestwall have been driven by various interrelated shortcomings of and abuses in the tort system,” company counsel explained in the bankruptcy petition.
The attorney cited a 2005 Madison County case that Georgia Pacific settled with a plaintiff who subsequently submitted 21 trust claims and ballots in nine bankruptcy cases based on exposures and products not disclosed during litigation.
Such shenanigans continue to this day, but U.S. District Judge Staci Yandle of the Southern District of Illinois wants no part of them.
Yandle has dismissed a challenge to an order from an out-of-state bankruptcy judge requiring asbestos plaintiffs to answer questions about exposure history. “Plaintiffs’ redress is in the district court of the Western District of North Carolina and the Fourth Circuit appellate court,” she said.
Last month, Bestwall filed a contempt motion against the Gori firm of Edwardsville, Maune Raichle of St. Louis, Cooney and Conway of Chicago, and the John Simmons firm in Alton. Bestwall offered to withdraw the motion if the firms dismissed the Illinois complaint. Only Simmons accepted the offer.
The other firms may regret their recalcitrance – if and when they’re charged with contempt.