Asbestos Exposure Attorney: What to Know Before You Call

Key Takeaways

Asbestos is a mineral fiber that was used for more than a century in American industry. According to the National Cancer Institute's asbestos fact sheet, it has been used in building and construction, shipbuilding, insulation, roofing, fireproofing, vehicle brake shoes and clutch pads, ceiling and floor tiles, paints, coatings, adhesives and plastics. When products containing asbestos are disturbed, fibers are released into the air. Once those fibers are breathed in, they can stay trapped in the lungs for a long time.

The facts below shape almost every case this site covers.

• The NCI reports that, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, there is sufficient evidence that asbestos causes mesothelioma and cancers of the lung, larynx and ovary. The NCI also states that asbestos exposure may increase the risk of asbestosis and other nonmalignant lung and pleural disorders.
• The NCI states that most people do not become ill from their exposure. People who do become ill are usually those exposed on a regular basis, most often in a job where they worked directly with the material or through substantial environmental contact.
• The NCI states that it can take from 10 to 40 years or more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear.
• Whether exposure without a diagnosed disease supports any legal claim is a question of state law. In the cases this site covers, the diagnosis is usually where the legal analysis begins.
• Limitation periods differ by state, and so does the point at which each one starts to run.
• Asbestos trust claims and civil lawsuits are distinct mechanisms. They have different rules, and a person should not assume that every route is open at the same time.

For someone in your position, the long gap between exposure and illness is the thread running through all of this. It affects what records still exist, which companies are involved, and which deadline applies, so the details you or your family remember about old jobs can carry real weight.

When Asbestos Exposure Becomes a Legal Matter

Whether exposure by itself is a legal matter is the right place to start, because exposure without a diagnosis and exposure with one stand in very different places.

Personal-injury law generally looks for an injury, not just a risk of one. In an asbestos case, the injury is usually a diagnosed disease. Whether a person who was exposed but has no diagnosis has any claim, and what that claim would look like, depends on the law of the state that governs. The rules are not the same everywhere, and nothing on this page suggests that exposure alone gives anyone a claim.

The NCI's list of diseases helps explain why the diagnosis matters so much. The fact sheet identifies mesothelioma, which it describes as a relatively rare cancer of the thin membranes that line the chest and abdomen, along with cancers of the lung, larynx and ovary. It also names asbestosis, pleural plaques, pleural thickening and benign pleural effusions. The fact sheet notes that most mesotheliomas are thought to be due to asbestos exposure.

Asbestosis is a lung disease caused by breathing in asbestos fibers. As the MedlinePlus asbestosis article explains, those fibers can cause scar tissue to form inside the lung, and scarred lung tissue does not expand and contract normally.

The latency period, meaning the long delay between exposure and illness, is why so many people receive a diagnosis decades after the exposure took place. The NCI places it at 10 to 40 years or more. MedlinePlus notes that asbestosis symptoms often go unnoticed for 20 years or more, and that malignant mesothelioma can develop 20 to 40 years after exposure. By the time someone is diagnosed, the job may have ended long ago, the employer may no longer exist, and coworkers may be scattered or gone.

The NCI also lists symptoms that are important to raise with a doctor, including shortness of breath, wheezing and hoarseness. Whether a symptom means anything, and what testing makes sense, is a medical question for a physician. This page offers no medical advice.

If you were exposed and have no diagnosis, or if a diagnosis has just arrived, an attorney can help clarify where the facts fall under the law that may govern them.

How These Cases Are Built: Tracing Exposure to Injury

An asbestos case usually rests on three connected pieces:

1. A diagnosed asbestos-related disease.
2. A source of exposure, such as a product, a worksite or a building.
3. A causal link between that exposure and the disease.

Each piece has to be supported by evidence. Whether the link is established depends on the facts and on the law that applies.

If you or the person you are thinking about worked in a trade, that history is often the starting point. The NCI states that health hazards from asbestos fibers have been recognized in workers in:

• the shipbuilding trades,
• asbestos mining and milling,
• manufacturing of asbestos textiles and other asbestos products,
• insulation work in the construction and building trades,
• a variety of other trades.

The fact sheet adds that demolition workers, drywall removers, asbestos removal workers, firefighters and automobile workers also may be exposed. Recognizing a job on that list does not establish a claim, but it can point toward where the evidence of exposure may be found. Our guide to occupational asbestos exposure looks at those trades in more detail.

Exposure does not always happen on the job. The NCI reports some evidence that family members of workers heavily exposed to asbestos face an increased risk of mesothelioma, thought to come from fibers carried into the home on the worker's shoes, clothing, skin and hair. MedlinePlus likewise notes that household members can be exposed through particles brought home on a worker's clothing. The NCI also records mesothelioma in people without occupational exposure who live close to asbestos mines. If you never worked with asbestos yourself, a family member's job may still be part of the story.

Because the exposure is often decades old, these cases are frequently built from paper and memory. If you were diagnosed, or if you are a family member after a death, the records that usually matter include:

• medical records and pathology reports,
• employment and work-history records,
• union or pension records showing where a person worked,
• product identification records,
• the names of coworkers who remember the conditions at a job site.

The NCI notes one limit worth knowing. A lung biopsy is the most reliable test to confirm exposure to asbestos, but neither a biopsy nor a bronchoscopy can determine how much asbestos a person was exposed to or whether disease will develop. That is part of why the work-history side of a case carries so much weight, and why old pay stubs or a coworker's name can matter as much as a medical test.

For a closer look at how these pieces come together, see our page on how an asbestos lawyer builds a case.

Who May Be Responsible: Defendants by Type

Families often wonder whether anyone can still be held responsible for an exposure that happened forty years ago. The law looks at categories of parties, and each category is measured against its own legal theory.

If the person worked with or near a particular product, such as insulation or brake parts, the company that made or sold it may be part of the picture. Claims against manufacturers and sellers generally fall under product liability, the area of law that addresses injuries caused by a product that was defective or unreasonably dangerous. Such a claim usually asks whether the product had such a defect, which can include a failure to warn, and whether that defect caused the injury. For a family, this means the focus may fall on what was in the material, not only on who signed the paychecks.

If the exposure happened at a plant, refinery, ship or building, the business that owned or ran that place may be involved. Claims against premises owners and operators generally fall under premises liability, the area of law that addresses the duty a property owner or operator owes to people on the property. A premises liability claim asks whether there was a duty of care, whether that duty was breached, whether the breach caused the injury, and what damages resulted.

The third category is employers and contractors, including outside contractors who installed or removed insulation and other materials. An employer's own responsibility to a worker is often handled through workers' compensation, which is a separate system from a civil lawsuit and has its own rules. How the two interact differs by state.

None of these categories means any particular company is responsible in any particular case. That depends on what the evidence shows about the products, the place, the work performed and the years involved.

Some companies that made asbestos products went through bankruptcy and left behind trusts that handle claims through their own procedures. For you, that means a company no longer operating does not by itself end the question of whether a route exists. A trust claim is a distinct mechanism from a civil lawsuit. Each has its own requirements, and the availability of one says nothing about the availability of the other. Our overview of how a mesothelioma lawsuit works explains how the two routes differ.

Sorting out which types of parties may be involved, and through which route, often depends on piecing together products and places from many years ago.

What the Diagnosis Changes About Your Legal Options

A diagnosis does more than name an illness. It sets the starting point for the legal questions that follow. If you or someone you love has just been told the disease is mesothelioma, asbestosis or lung cancer, the legal picture now looks different than it did before that appointment.

Different diagnoses can lead to different legal pathways. Mesothelioma, asbestosis, asbestos-related lung cancer and the other conditions the NCI lists are not treated the same way in every state. The medical evidence also differs by disease.

Smoking is one example. The NCI states that smoking combined with asbestos exposure greatly increases lung cancer risk beyond the two risks added together, but does not appear to increase the risk of mesothelioma. A smoking history can therefore come up differently in a lung cancer case than in a mesothelioma case. How a state's fault rules treat it depends on that state's law.

The damages the law may allow are described in categories. Common ones include:

• medical expenses,
• lost income,
• pain and suffering.

What a particular state allows, and what each category depends on, comes from that state's law and the facts of the case. Nothing here suggests what any case may lead to.

When a person dies from an asbestos-related disease, the family's questions change. A wrongful death claim is a claim brought by surviving family members, or by a representative on their behalf, for losses caused by a death. Who may bring that claim, and which categories of damages a state's wrongful death statute names, both differ from state to state. Some states also allow a separate claim on behalf of the person's estate for what the person suffered before death. The questions facing spouses and estate representatives are covered on this site's family resource pages.

Veterans raise a further set of questions. Service records, the branch of service and the duties performed can all bear on where and how exposure happened. VA benefits and civil claims against private companies are distinct mechanisms with different rules. Not every veteran qualifies for every option, and how the two may sit side by side depends on the facts and the rules that apply.

An attorney can walk through what a specific diagnosis means for the routes that may be open.

Filing Deadlines and Why They Differ by State

If you are weighing whether to look into a claim, the filing deadline is the rule with the most at stake. A statute of limitations is a law that sets the period within which a legal claim must be filed, and a claim filed after that period ends can be barred.

There is no single national rule. Each state sets its own limitation periods for personal-injury claims and for wrongful death claims, and each state decides when its period starts to run. A state's rule may tie the starting point to the exposure, to the diagnosis, or to the time a person learned, or reasonably should have learned, of the illness and its connection to asbestos. Exceptions vary as well. Because the NCI places the latency period at 10 to 40 years or more, the question of when the clock starts carries special weight in asbestos cases.

Wrongful death claims usually have their own limitation periods, separate from the period for a claim the person could have brought while alive. Those periods also differ by state and may start at a different point, often tied to the date of death. A family after a loss may be looking at more than one deadline at once.

More than one state's law can also come into play. Someone may have worked in one state, lived in another and been diagnosed in a third. Which state's law governs is a legal question in its own right. This page does not set out any state's deadline, and it cannot say how much time anyone has.

If a deadline is the question weighing on you, you may want to consider a conversation about which state's rule applies. That conversation can address which state's law may govern, what event may have started the period, and what exceptions that state recognizes.

Questions Worth Asking Before You Speak With an Attorney

Families often arrive at a first conversation with a shoebox of papers and a memory of a job from decades ago. Both turn out to be useful, because, as the earlier sections explain, these cases are often built from records and recollection rather than from a single test.

A first conversation about an asbestos case usually turns to a familiar set of subjects:

• The person's work history: the employers, the job sites and the years worked at each.
• The products and materials involved, such as insulation, gaskets, brake parts, cement pipe or floor tile, whether the person worked with them directly or worked near others who did.
• The time period of the exposure, along with any military service and the duties performed.
• The diagnosis: when it was made, which physicians made it, and what the pathology showed.
• Whether family members were also exposed, for example through work clothes brought home.

If you are the person who was diagnosed, your own memory of job sites and coworkers can be some of the most detailed information available. If you are a family member after a death, the useful material often includes pay stubs, union cards, service records, old photographs and the names of people who worked alongside the person who died. Gathering what exists, even if it seems incomplete, can make that first conversation more productive.

Some questions families commonly bring to that conversation are:

• How might the diagnosis affect the routes that are open?
• Which state's law might govern?
• How do trust claims and lawsuits differ?
• How do VA benefits relate to a civil claim?

A case evaluation is a conversation about what happened. It is not a promise to take a case and not a prediction of how anything will turn out. This page also does not replace a physician. Questions about symptoms, testing or treatment belong with a doctor, and the NCI fact sheet notes that people who were exposed, or suspect they were, can tell their doctor about their exposure history. For questions about how to approach that first meeting, see our page on choosing a mesothelioma lawyer.