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The Big Breakthrough
Why is the extent of this nationwide scandal only now coming to light? A big part of the answer comes from Rocket Science, literally. This computer consulting firm revolutionized asbestos defense work by turning paper documents into digital ones and attaching electronic "sticky tags," allowing fast mass analyses. That meant defense lawyers at firms like Forman Perry in Jackson, Mississippi, could finally deal with the millions of documents dumped on them by plaintiff lawyers and challenge the hundreds of thousands of asbestosis and silicosis suits being filed.The new Rocket Science technology was able to turn suspicion into hard evidence. Forman Perry attorney Daniel Mulholland knew that asbestosis and silicosis almost never occur in the same person, they scar the lungs in very different ways, and the scarring remains over a lifetime. So if a plaintiff's doctor had claimed he saw one kind of scarring, but on later examination decided it was the other kind instead, something was up. "If I could show that happened not only once or twice but hundreds of times, I'm where I need to be," Mulholland says.
The Rocket Science program began spitting out asbestos "retreads," people who already had an asbestosis claim and now were part of silicosis suits. It was this hard data that helped destroy the doctors' testimony back in February 2005 and sealed the plaintiffs' fate before Judge Jack.
Defense attorney Marcy Croft savored the outcome in Jack's court, but remains steamed about the complicity of lawyers, doctors and screeners in those cases. "They weren't conducting screenings, they were selling widgets," she says. "It just happened that the widgets were human beings." The damage to companies ultimately negatively affects employees' wages, pensions and job security. "It's the people on the factory floor we're working for. Money shouldn't go to a junior college dropout with the sensitivity of a toad."
Croft and other defense attorneys have more work ahead. There are still thousands of silicosis cases to deal with, and hundreds of thousands of asbestosis cases. The next big battleground is a Philadelphia federal court, where an asbestos suit, claiming 99,000 victims, is being heard. Already Forman Perry researchers are culling through four million documents, with truckloads more on the way.
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