S02E68 Asbestos Litigation Changes with Justinian Lane

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founded Asbestos Claims Law in 2013 after seeing firsthand the devastating effects of asbestos exposure in his own family . His grandfather , a World War II veteran , along with his grandmother and father , all developed asbestos-related illnesses due to their work .

That personal experience shaped his passion for advocating on behalf of victims and holding corporations accountable for putting profits over people's safety . In addition to his legal work , justinian commissions research on asbestos risks and is currently finishing a book on the subject .

He's a strong voice in the fight against corporate negligence and an advocate for those harmed by asbestos exposure . I'm excited to have you here , justinian . Welcome , hey , thank you .

it the cloud and then when the dot-com crash happened around 2000 , everything I did got outsourced overseas and I went from being a valued professional to somebody who didn't have a job or a career path anymore and I was looking for , obviously , a way to reinvent myself . And I'd always done a lot of work as a consultant doing computer work for law firms .

So I was doing a little bit of that still on the side and they kind of shuffled me into a paralegal type of a role and it didn't take long before I discovered I actually really enjoyed what the practice of law entailed , with , you know , doing the research and finding an objectively correct answer and knowing if I have something you know that I can win a case

with her . I really liked that sort of a thing . But I began the journey to go to law school and become an attorney . So that was a little later on in my life , in my late twenties , when I had to kind of reinvent myself .

is . It's a mineral . There's actually six types of asbestos and the most common kind was 80 something percent , was called Chrysotile and this is what it actually looked like . I actually picked myself from a former asbestos mine that was involved in a case .

I had to kind of visit it and you can see , it's this fluffy substance and you can weave things into it , you can make gloves , you can make all kinds of things out of it .

So it's a mineral , it's fireproof and , among all of its other great properties of fireproof , heat resistant it's also very dangerous , and the reason that it's dangerous is because of the way that it forms .

Now you understand , of course , that an ice cube and a glass of water are chemically identical , but if I throw an ice cube at your head , it's going to hurt more than maybe water . So this is the chrysotile of cestus , which is chemically identical to this rock If you looked at it under the microscope .

This rock is a cestus chemically , but it didn't form the same way .

Just like ice becomes a solid , a Asbestos formed into fibers that are tiny and needle sharp and when they go into your tissue and your lungs or other areas where you breathe or ingest it , they start causing scarring and other problems that over time that can lead to serious diseases like cancer .

So asbestos basically is a mineral that can be woven or manipulated into other different shapes and it is very harmful if you breathe it or ingest it .

It would have been in the fireproof laboratory counters . It would have been in the blackboard , would have been in the walls all kinds . Asbestos was once as common as plastic is today . So if you were doing your business in the 50s or the 60s , you absolutely interacted with asbestos . If you lived in a city , there was no way not to .

It touched every part of everybody's lives and today it's mostly forgotten , except , of course , when people get ill from the tragedy of breathing it in .

If you see , you know the old classic asbestos floor tile kind of you know ugly vinyl tiles from the 70s . Those are fine unless they're damaged . So if you see them you don't have to worry about removing them unless they're damaged . The same thing with a lot of asbestos products .

If it's called encapsulated , which means the fibers are trapped inside something else , it's not going to harm you then . So if you're in an older structure and there is damage you see visible damage to a wall , things like that you might have some issues you want to get taken care of .

But by and large , if you don't disturb the materials and leave them where they are , you'll put them apart , you'll be fine .

had asbestos that you painted over you would seal that in .

When they call it friable , that means broken into chunks and it can go into the air . And , as you saw , I mean these fibers are . They can be very thin and studies have shown that a single fiber on a windy day can travel over a mile and a half . Because these things take forever to finally set down .

When they hit the ground , because they're so small , they just float .

So you'll end up with a situation where you're mining talc but you're also mining a little bit of asbestos . And if you were to take , say , I don't know , a pound of sugar and just put a couple of drops of salt from the salt shaker in there and then shake that whole thing up , you're never getting the salt out , it's just in there . It's impossible , right .

So that's what they ended up having with cosmetic tell that would be contaminated with a spasser . So a lot of women over the years primarily women have used cosmetic towels and they're actually they're dousing it on themselves and they're breathing asbestos virus .

Now , in the late 1990s my mother had ovarian cancer which thankfully she recovered from and is still alive and doing well today . At the time we just thought it was bad luck , but decades later we found out .

Oh , actually , yes , I can still remember the shower-to-shower powder that she used and all of that asbestos , all of that talc was contaminated with asbestos . So you know her records were long since gone . There's nothing I could do , but in all likelihood her ovarian cancer was caused by asbestos and talc .

So a whole lot of the asbestos litigation these days is going after companies who knew that their asbestos was contaminated , or rather who knew that their tout was contaminated with asbestos . So that's one big area . And then , of course , the other big area that we're seeing a lot of is people who have what we call secondary exposure to asbestos .

They didn't work primarily with it themselves . They resided in the home of somebody who did so .

A lot of our clients today are actually the children of asbestos workers , who don't have any other real exposure to asbestos other than what their mom , or typically their dad , brought home on their work clothes , and they laundered the clothes and over time they got a dose of that in their own home and as they got older it caused problems .

So that's what we're starting to see now .

Okay , that's great , but there's still asbestos in it and science has come to the conclusion that there is no known safe dose of asbestos . What that doesn't mean if you breathe even a little bit , you're going to get sick . What that means is , if you breathe even a tiny bit of it , we can't guarantee that you won't get sick .

So even a small exposure from maybe some cosmetic talc or something else that has a little bit of a substance years and years later can cause serious illnesses . The typical the period is called the latency period between when you were exposed and when you get sick , and it's not uncommon to have that latency period be 50 or even 60 years .

But the problems from asbestos are coming to us today because people were exposed 40 , 50 , 60 years ago .

they're exposed as a child and they grieve the sand , then obviously , as they continue to develop and grow into adults , that just exacerbates the problem .

But tiny lungs , those fibers are bigger , so it's going to do more damage . And studies have shown that when children have been exposed to pollutants like asbestos at a very young age , that stunts their development and their lungs never get to be as good as they should .

We've seen a lot of clients recently who are in their mid-50s or sometimes even a little earlier , who've never smoked and their lungs are in terrible condition . You can objectively see it .

The doctors look on the x-ray and then you take a breath test that measures it and you see people with terrible , terrible lungs and the only conclusion we can come to it must've been the asbestos that was brought into the home . We had one client who was a school teacher . She did nothing around asbestos ever , except her dad worked in a refinery .

She washed and clothed and was exposed to it on a daily basis for years that way .

So when that gives cancer it's very painful and that's the most serious disease and we do that , of course . But there's also lung cancer that asbestos can cause and the signature disease asbestosis , which is caused only by asbestos .

Years of latency . That's how they got away with that .

So the most important thing that we do is the detective work . Where did you live ? Where did you grow up ? Where did you go to school ? What did your dad do ? Did you have other workers ? You know family members that worked around things . The more different avenues of exposure we can find , the more avenues of recovery there are .

That's why we spend so much time researching and delving into all of the history , because when a client comes to us , we have to figure out what they were doing 40 years ago , not what they were doing yesterday .

Now , lung cancer can be caused by a lot of things , of course , including smoking . But if you smoke and you are exposed to asbestos , you're far more likely to get lung cancer than if you just smoke or you were just exposed to asbestos . So anybody who has lung cancer at all I would advise take a look . Maybe there could be asbestos .

And even if you're a smoker , that may not be the whole story . There's also lung cancer , I'm sorry . Throat cancer , laryngeal and pharyngeal , stomach cancer and colorectal cancer and ovarian cancer

. All of those types of cancers have connections directly to asbestos . Lots of other cancer types do not . Last year I had thyroid cancer . I had my thyroid removed . Thyroid cancer has no connection to asbestos and you can bet that . I looked that up just to make sure . But there are certain types that , yep , asbestos could have caused it .

Other types , absolutely not . Another one we get asked all the time prostate cancer not caused by asbestos exposure and lots of other potential causes . Asbestos isn't one . Basically , asbestos has to embed itself into tissue somehow . That's how it causes the illness . So if you don't inhale it or ingest it , it won't hurt you .

So is that a concern , or is there a period of time of when it was more used in our construction materials ?

So , like the post-war boom , all of the building , all of that would have had asbestos in it . So , like the post-war boom , all of the building , all of that would have had asbestos in it by 72, . Osha had come along and was starting to regulate asbestos . So it wasn't used quite as much . And by the mid-80s , very little .

Asbestos was still being used to build much of anything outside of super specialty stuff . So your real issue is anything , say , between 1930 and 1980 , early 80s . That's when you're most likely to have had it built with asbestos .

Another advantage that asbestos had was it was substantially lighter than other materials , and after World War I we had entered into treaties where our ships couldn't weigh more than a certain amount of tons . They did the math and they realized well , if we use asbestos we've saved this many tons , but now we can load up with guns and ammo .

So the Navy had tons of exposure to asbestos , but so did every other branch because it would have been used and being built in barracks . Any aircraft in the era would have had asbestos throughout it . Hanks would have any automobile . I mean we even left asbestos on the moon . It was part of the Apollo capsule .

So anything that people did in an industrial era in the 60s or 70s , they would have had exposure to asbestos . And also in the military for some period of time . A number of ammunition manufacturers used it as wadding in the shells , so that when people are shooting . They're actually getting a small dose of the specimen .

It was mined primarily up in Canada , although here in Arizona we did have a couple of small mines . Then the other two that were used commercially were called Chrysotilite and Amethyte . Those only come from Africa and Australia and they were more specialty products .

So like the Navy used amosite because it was really good for insulation on ships , Chrysidolite would resist acid so it would be in chemical plants , refineries . But for the most part chrysotile was the asbestos that everybody used . It was sometimes called white asbestos because it looks white and they all can cause all the different types of cancers and illnesses .

Chrysotile is a little less likely than that chrysotilite or amycite , but it's still very deadly . The majority of cancers and mesotheliomas caused by asbestos are from chrysotile , because that's the majority of asbestos out there . Okay , Christ child , because that's the majority of the stuff that's out there .

A lot of them aren't going to be able to get as much compensation as they're entitled to because they didn't work directly with these products and they can't name them . For example , if your dad worked in a refinery , you don't know what product that he worked with . You just know you breathe some asbestos .

So we do everything we can for these people and we can still do pretty well , but it's difficult . If somebody you know today is in their 60s and their dad passed away decades ago , they just know he brought it home . We have to do that detective work to figure out what it might have been and prove that .

It'd be really helpful if somebody in the legislature would try to look at truly innocent people who are just the children and come up with some sort of a solution to lower a burden of proof or something along the lines , so these people can get some compensation for having their entire lung .

But for the last 10 , 15 years at least , any uses of it in this country were super specialized . The rest of the world they still have massive mines operating in China and Russia and I've seen videos from inside the plants because they're proud of what they're making .

I just shake my head seeing all this dust and realizing you guys are going to kill a generation of your people a decade from now . But the product is cheap , so they're happy with it .

So for anybody who , god forbid , has one of these diseases , or somebody who's in asbestos legal industry and wants a better place to learn and understand , we're gathering all those and putting them together , because some of the terms are pretty technical and it's not always the easiest to find out where to go . Asbestos is kind of it's a bit of a niche .

There's not a lot of firms that do this , so it's not . You know , if you want to learn about car wrecks , it's pretty easy , but if you want to learn about asbestos , you have to dig a little deeper .

So that's about probably a three and a half hour video series If anybody's really interested it's right there .

appreciate it . This has been quite interesting .

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