ERIE, Pa. (Legal Newsline) – Attorneys for a company tasked with paying millions of dollars to asbestos claimants have previewed their arguments for a coming trial that would require plaintiff lawyers to work much harder.
Honeywell International filed its pre-trial brief on April 22 in Pennsylvania federal court, where next month a trial will determine if those in charge of a trust established to pay asbestos money has been lax in its standards.
Honeywell funds the North American Refractories Company trust, one of dozens filed by companies brought to their knees by the costs of litigating asbestos cases in civil court. Establishing trusts allowed claimants and companies alike to avoid expensive discovery and trials, while also eliminating the possibility of jackpot verdicts.
But Honeywell says the NARCO trust is too free with the money set aside for asbestos victims. It says, despite an agreement not to do so years ago, it has only required simple form affidavits from asbestos lawyers.
This is in violation of the Trust Distribution Procedures, the company said in its pre-trial brief.
“The TDP… imposes two separate and independent criteria that claimants must meet in order to establish valid claims: Establishing by competent and credible evidence first, the presence of a specific NARCO asbestos-containing product at the claimant’s worksite, and second, claimant’s occupation exposure to that specific NACP,” the brief says.
“Boilerplate ‘form’ affidavits are not competent or credible evidence of exposure sufficient to meet the criteria set forth in the TDP.”
In September, Honeywell filed its complaints that the NARCO trust is paying millions of dollars to claimants who do not have credible evidence of exposure to NARCO products. A return to accepting simple form submissions from claimants has created a windfall for lawyers, the company says.
A subpoena targeted Maryland asbestos lawyer Peter Nicholl, who has earned more than $85 million for his clients from the NARCO trust, Honeywell says. The company wanted documents regarding more than 1,600 of Nicholl’s clients.
Nicholl’s clients are remarkable for their pristine memory of NARCO products at their worksites decades earlier, the company claims. It thinks he fills in the blanks for them, then files requests for compensation with the NARCO trust that are rubber-stamped.
Since the trust began accepting forms again, Nicholl has made $46 million in two years, Honeywell says. The company’s litigation filed in September seeks to end the acceptance of those forms.
Honeywell says the trust has adopted a “refractory inference,” which allows it to infer exposure to NARCO products if the claimant shows exposure to generic refractory products.