The Longest-Running Mass Tort in America: Asbestos & Mesothelioma Litigation From 1929 to 2026
You are reading this at a hour when no one should have to be awake. A doctor used a word you were not prepared to hear — mesothelioma — and now you are sitting at a kitchen table with a phone in your hand and a clock you cannot see already running against you. Maybe it is your diagnosis. Maybe it is your father’s, your husband’s, your mother’s. Whoever it is, the fear is the same: the disease is terminal, the treatment is brutal, and somewhere in the back of your mind you are thinking about a job that ended thirty or forty years ago — insulation you cut without a mask, pipe wrapping you tore out with your bare hands, a refinery unit where the dust hung in the air like fog — and you are wondering whether the company that put that dust there owes you something.
It does. And the law has been making it pay for nearly a century.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are trial lawyers who handle toxic tort and catastrophic injury cases, and we have spent our careers in the courtroom fighting the companies that poisoned their own workers and their own customers. This page is not a brochure. It is the full history of how asbestos litigation became the longest-running mass tort in the United States — from the first dismissed lawsuit in 1929 through the landmark strict-liability case that opened the courthouse doors in 1973, through the corporate bankruptcies that created the trust-fund system, through the modern talc-contamination verdicts that have juries ordering Johnson & Johnson to pay more than $2 billion — and it is written so that you understand, before you ever pick up the phone, exactly what your rights are, how fast the evidence is dying, and why the day you call a lawyer is the day the clock starts working for you instead of against you.
Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win your case. And we can talk to you in Spanish — Hablamos Español — because the families hit hardest by asbestos are often the ones whose language the insurance company does not bother to speak.
How We Got Here: The Century of Asbestos and the Corporations That Knew
Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral that was prized for its durability, its heat resistance, and its affordability. The first U.S. patent for asbestos-containing insulation was issued in 1828. By the mid-twentieth century, asbestos was in thousands of industrial and commercial products — pipe insulation, boiler covering, brake linings, ceiling tiles, floor tiles, joint compound, gaskets, cement pipe, roofing materials, and on and on. Between 1940 and 1979, an estimated 27 million Americans were exposed to asbestos at work.
The companies knew it was killing people. They knew early.
As early as 1918, U.S. officials identified unusually high rates of early death among asbestos workers. In 1924, a woman named Nellie Kershaw died in England after years of working in an asbestos textile mill. Her doctor diagnosed her with “asbestos poisoning.” Her employer refused to provide compensation, arguing the illness was not a recognized occupational disease. She died, and her case became the first recorded death linked to asbestos in the medical literature.
In 1929, Anna Pirskowski filed the first asbestos lawsuit in the United States, against the Johns Manville Corporation in New Jersey. She had worked for Johns Manville until 1922, when she was forced to leave her job due to a malignant lung disease linked to asbestos. She sought $50,000, alleging that Johns Manville failed to provide a safe work environment with proper ventilation or protective masks. Johns Manville responded that Pirskowski had “assumed the risks” of asbestos exposure as part of her employment. A judge dismissed the case in 1934 without awarding compensation. The first asbestos lawsuit in American history was a loss — and the defense that killed it, “the worker knew the job was dangerous,” would be the industry’s shield for decades.
What the public did not know — what the courts did not know — was that the industry’s own executives had already decided to bury the evidence. In 1933, studies in the United Kingdom and the United States linked asbestos exposure to pulmonary disease. Industry executives downplayed the research and prevented the findings from being published in journals. The cover-up was not accidental. It was a conscious, documented decision, and the proof of it would not surface for another forty-four years.
The Sumner Simpson Papers: The Smoking Gun
In 1977, attorneys working on asbestos litigation uncovered a collection of letters and internal memos between asbestos industry executives dating back to the 1930s. The documents were named the Sumner Simpson Papers, after the former president of Raybestos-Manhattan, Inc. What they contained was an admission of deliberate corporate concealment that would reshape the entire landscape of asbestos litigation.
“I think the less said about asbestos, the better off we are.”
That was Sumner Simpson, writing to Vandiver Brown, the general counsel at Johns Manville. Brown’s response was equally damning:
“I quite agree with you that our interests are best served by having asbestosis receive the minimum of publicity.”
These were not opinions. They were strategy. Industry leaders had made a conscious decision to suppress research linking asbestos to pulmonary disease and to minimize public awareness of the danger. The Sumner Simpson Papers became the engine of punitive damages in asbestos litigation — proof that the harm was not merely negligent but deliberate, proof that the companies had chosen profits over human lives with full knowledge of the consequences. When you hear about nine-figure punitive damage awards in asbestos cases, this correspondence is where they come from.
1966-1969: The First Trial — and the First Loss
In July 1966, a Texas insulation worker named Claude Tomplait was diagnosed with asbestosis after more than 20 years of occupational asbestos exposure. He filed a lawsuit against 11 companies, including Johns Manville, Fibreboard Paper Products, and Owens Corning Fiberglas. He claimed the companies knew or should have known their products were dangerous but failed to warn him. He sought $500,000. The case went to trial in 1969 — and the jury returned a verdict for the defendants. The first asbestos products lawsuit to reach a jury was another loss.
1973: Borel v. Fibreboard — The Case That Changed Everything
Clarence Borel was a co-worker of Claude Tomplait. He had spent more than 30 years as an industrial insulation worker before developing asbestosis and mesothelioma. Borel filed his lawsuit — Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corporation — with the same attorney who had represented Tomplait. Borel passed away from his illnesses before the case concluded. But his attorney broadened the legal approach in a way that would transform American products liability law. He argued that the companies should be held strictly liable — meaning they were responsible for the harm caused by their products regardless of intent, because asbestos-containing products were unreasonably dangerous and lacked adequate warnings.
In 1973, the court ruled in Borel’s favor. His family was awarded $79,436. The dollar amount was modest. The legal principle was seismic. Strict liability meant that a manufacturer of an unreasonably dangerous product could not escape responsibility by arguing it had been careful — the product itself was the proof, and the duty to warn was absolute. Borel v. Fibreboard paved the way for thousands of future asbestos claims and fundamentally changed how American courts viewed manufacturer responsibility for dangerous products.
1982-1988: The Bankruptcy Trust System Is Born
By 1982, less than ten years after Borel, approximately 21,000 asbestos claims had been filed and more than $1 billion had been spent on litigation costs. Three major asbestos-related companies — Johns Manville, Amatex, and UNR Industries — filed for bankruptcy, hoping to escape the lawsuits. Johns Manville had been named in more than 16,000 claims. It was once the largest producer of asbestos-containing products in the United States.
The bankruptcy strategy nearly worked. But courts saw through the attempt to avoid responsibility, and in 1988, as part of Johns Manville’s bankruptcy reorganization, the company was ordered to create the first asbestos trust fund in U.S. history — seeded with $2.5 billion to pay current and future victims. This was the birth of the trust-fund system under the federal bankruptcy code, which permits asbestos defendants to channel their liability into court-supervised trusts funded through bankruptcy proceedings. Over 100 trusts have since been established. As of 2026, approximately 60 remain active.
The Johns Manville trust has now paid out more than $5 billion on more than 1 million claims. In 2024, it paid out its millionth claim — a milestone that measures both the scale of the harm and the machinery that was built to address it.
1997: The End of Asbestos Class Actions
In Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed a proposed class action settlement involving asbestos claims. The plaintiffs had been exposed to different products and developed various illnesses of widely varying severity. The Court ruled against the proposed settlement, noting the claims were too diverse to be grouped together. This ruling effectively ended the use of class action lawsuits for mesothelioma and other asbestos-related claims. Today, every asbestos claim is filed individually — which means your case is yours, not a line item in a global settlement, and the compensation reflects your specific exposure, your specific disease, and your specific losses.
2003: The Largest Single-Defendant Mesothelioma Verdict
On March 28, 2003, a jury ordered U.S. Steel to pay $250 million to the family of Roby Whittington, who developed mesothelioma after working at the company’s Indiana steel plant. The verdict included $50 million in compensatory damages — for medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering — and $200 million in punitive damages, to punish U.S. Steel for its negligence. This remains the largest mesothelioma verdict against a single defendant in the history of asbestos litigation. The ratio of punitive to compensatory damages — four to one — tells you what the jury thought of the company’s conduct.
2006-2018: The Talc Frontier Opens
In 2006, a New Jersey jury delivered the first mesothelioma verdict involving asbestos-contaminated industrial talc, awarding $3 million to the widow of a man who used industrial talc in his pottery studio and died at 53. The defendant, R.T. Vanderbilt Co., had argued the fibers in its talc were not asbestos. The jury disagreed.
In 2018, Johnson & Johnson and talc supplier Imerys Talc America were ordered to pay $117 million to a mesothelioma patient who had used J&J talcum powder products for decades in his personal care routine — the first successful lawsuit involving J&J’s cosmetic talc products and mesothelioma. This case marked a turning point. Asbestos does not only come from pipe insulation in a refinery. It can come from the baby powder on a bathroom shelf, because talc and asbestos form together in the earth, and the mining process can contaminate talcum powder with microscopic asbestos fibers.
2025: J&J Hit With Verdicts Totaling Over $2 Billion
In 2025, juries delivered a series of major verdicts against Johnson & Johnson in mesothelioma talc cases. In December 2025, a Maryland jury awarded more than $1.5 billion to a woman diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma. Just weeks earlier, another jury awarded $966 million to the family of a California grandmother who died from mesothelioma — $16 million in actual damages and $950 million in punitive damages.
In March 2026, a Los Angeles judge tossed the punitive damages in the California case, finding insufficient evidence that J&J knew there was asbestos in their products. The compensatory portion — the $16 million — stood. That outcome is a reminder that verdicts are not final until appeals are exhausted, and that the punitive-damages component of any asbestos verdict is the most fiercely contested. But it also shows that companies can be held accountable, and that juries — when they hear the evidence — understand what was done.
The Defendants: Manufacturers, Trust Funds, and the Corporate Shell Game
One of the things that makes asbestos litigation different from every other mass tort is that the defendants fall into two broad categories: solvent companies you can sue in court, and insolvent companies that have gone through bankruptcy and whose liability has been channeled to court-supervised trust funds. The average asbestos claim now names 75 defendants. Some of those defendants are live companies with insurance towers and balance sheets. Others are trust funds with published payment schedules. Your case needs to pursue both streams in parallel.
Johns Manville Corporation — The Archetype
Johns Manville was the largest producer of asbestos-containing products in the United States. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1982 after being named in more than 16,000 asbestos claims. As part of its bankruptcy plan, the company was ordered to establish the Johns Manville asbestos trust — the first in U.S. history — seeded with $2.5 billion in 1988. As of 2024, the JM trust has paid out more than $5 billion on more than 1 million claims. Even though the company stopped using asbestos decades ago, victims of Johns Manville products are still being diagnosed today — because the latency period means people exposed in the 1970s and 1980s are only now getting sick.
If you were exposed to a Johns Manville product, you cannot sue the company in court. But you can file a claim with the trust, and the trust is obligated to evaluate and pay qualifying claims according to its published payment schedule. This is a separate recovery stream from your lawsuit against solvent defendants — you do both.
Johnson & Johnson — The Modern Frontier
Johnson & Johnson is the defendant at the center of the talc-contamination mesothelioma cases. J&J has attempted to resolve its talc liability through a series of bankruptcy maneuvers — creating a subsidiary (LTL Management LLC, later renamed Red River Talc LLC) to hold the liability and filing for Chapter 11 protection. Three times the company tried this strategy. Three times a bankruptcy court rejected it — most recently on March 31, 2025, when the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas denied confirmation and dismissed the prepackaged Chapter 11, finding vote-solicitation irregularities and impermissible nonconsensual third-party releases. The cases are back in the tort system.
J&J’s 2025 verdicts — the $1.5 billion Maryland peritoneal mesothelioma verdict and the $966 million California verdict — demonstrate what juries do when they hear the evidence. But the California case also shows the defense’s playbook: the punitive damages were vacated in March 2026 for insufficient evidence of J&J’s knowledge. The compensatory damages stood. That is the honest framing: verdicts are real, but they are not final until appeals are done.
The Trust Fund System — Your Parallel Recovery
Under federal bankruptcy law, asbestos defendants can channel their liability to court-supervised trusts funded through bankruptcy proceedings. Over 100 trusts have been established. As of 2026, approximately 60 remain active. Each trust has its own evidentiary requirements, its own payment schedule, and its own queue. Trust payment percentages can be reduced as claims volume increases — which means filing earlier in a trust’s claims queue generally yields a higher payment percentage.
This is critical to understand: trust claims are not a substitute for litigation against solvent defendants. They are a parallel stream. A complete asbestos case identifies every trust that corresponds to a product the victim was exposed to and files claims with each, while simultaneously pursuing litigation against every solvent manufacturer, distributor, or premises owner whose product or facility contributed to the exposure. The trust claims provide faster, more certain compensation at lower per-claim values. The litigation provides the potential for full compensatory and punitive damages from solvent defendants. You do both.
The Corporate Shell Game
Asbestos defendants — like the refinery and chemical operators many of our clients worked for — operate through layered corporate structures designed to put a judgment-proof shell between the injured person and the real assets. A single asbestos exposure might have occurred at a facility owned by one LLC, operated by a management company, supplied by a manufacturer that has since been acquired by a parent corporation, with insurance placed through a captive insurer. The average claim names 75 defendants because the corporate structure is deliberately complex, and naming only the obvious defendant is how a case quietly shrinks to nothing.
Identifying the correct corporate entities — the operating company, the parent, the successor-in-interest, the trust — is foundational work that begins on the day you call. We pull Secretary of State filings, corporate registries, historical acquisition records, and bankruptcy court records to build the full defendant map. If you name the wrong entity, you can lose the right to recover from the right one.
The Evidence Clock: What Is Dying While You Read This
Every asbestos case is a race against the destruction of evidence, and the clock is faster than you think. Here is what exists, who holds it, and how fast it can legally die.
Your Work History — Critical, Already Eroding
Your complete occupational history is the foundation of the case — it proves the exposure pathway and identifies the specific defendants. But many employers from the peak asbestos-use decades of 1940 to 1979 no longer exist. The companies closed, were acquired, went bankrupt, or simply dissolved. What survives is the government record: Social Security Administration earnings records, which trace your employment history by employer and year. Union membership files may still exist if you were a member of a trade union. Military service records document shipyard, boiler-room, and barracks exposures for veterans — a population disproportionately affected by asbestos.
These records must be requested immediately. SSA earnings records can take weeks to obtain. Union archives are maintained by locals that may have merged or disbanded. The faster we pull your full employment history, the faster we can identify every potential defendant and every accessible trust.
Product Identification — Extreme Urgency
Product identification is the make-or-break element of asbestos litigation. You must establish specific exposure to specific defendants’ specific products. Co-worker corroborating testimony is often the single most powerful evidence — someone who worked alongside you and can confirm, “Yes, we used Owens Corning pipe insulation on that job” or “I remember the boxes of joint compound with the Georgia-Pacific label.” But the worker population from the 1940s through 1970s exposure era is elderly and passing. Co-worker affidavits must be taken while witnesses remain competent and available. Every month that passes is another month of witnesses lost.
Medical Records and Pathology Specimens — Immediate
Your biopsy and resection specimens should be located and preserved for forensic fiber analysis before the hospital disposes of them. Pathology blocks and slides are irreplaceable. Hospitals operate on retention schedules — once the retention period passes, the specimens can be legally destroyed. If the tissue that proved your diagnosis is destroyed, you lose the ability to perform asbestos fiber analysis that can tie the disease to a specific type of exposure. Request the full pathology file immediately — the blocks, the slides, the original diagnostic report.
Corporate Knowledge Documents — Moderate Risk
Many of the internal corporate documents that prove fraudulent concealment — the Sumner Simpson Papers and comparable internal memos, safety committee minutes, industry correspondence — are already in the public record from decades of prior litigation. But case-specific discovery may yield additional internal documents from defendants not previously sued, and those documents may be subject to corporate retention policies that allow destruction. The preservation letter is what freezes them.
Bankruptcy Trust Documentation — High Risk
Trust claims provide parallel compensation, but each trust has its own evidentiary requirements. Trust payment percentages can be reduced as claims volume increases. Filing earlier in a trust’s queue generally yields a higher payment percentage. The trusts are not going to run out of money tomorrow, but the payment percentage for a trust that is processing claims at 40% today may be processing at 25% in two years if claims volume surges. Every month of delay is a month of potential payment-percentage erosion.
What We Do About It
The day you call us, the preservation machinery starts. We send preservation letters to every identified defendant — ordering them to freeze employment records, product documentation, internal correspondence, safety committee minutes, and any physical evidence. We request your SSA earnings records, your military service file, your union membership records. We locate and demand your pathology specimens. We begin identifying and interviewing co-workers while they are still alive and able to testify. The letter that freezes the evidence goes out before the funeral, not after the insurance company calls — because by the time the insurance company calls, the evidence may already be gone.
The Insurance and Corporate Playbook — and How We Counter Each Move
The companies that exposed you to asbestos have been defending these cases for fifty years. They have a playbook, and it is well-practiced. Here are the moves you should expect — and what we do about each one.
Play 1: “You Cannot Prove It Was Our Product”
The defense’s primary strategy is to attack product identification. They will argue that you cannot specifically identify their product among the many asbestos-containing materials you encountered over a 30-year career. They will demand a level of specificity — exact brand names, exact dates, exact quantities — that no human being could provide for work performed four decades ago. They will point to the absence of invoices, shipping manifests, and product labels that were never preserved.
Our counter: Product identification does not require a receipt. It requires a combination of your own testimony (refreshed by photographs, product brochures, and trade catalogs from the era), co-worker corroborating affidavits, circumstantial evidence (the type of work you performed, the time period, the typical products used in that trade), and expert reconstruction by an industrial hygienist. The standard is not “beyond a reasonable doubt” — it is whether a reasonable jury could conclude that exposure to this defendant’s product was a substantial factor in causing the disease. We build that proof with co-worker testimony taken while witnesses are still alive, with historical product catalogs that show what was commonly used in your trade, and with your own detailed work history reconstructed from SSA records.
Play 2: “The Statute of Limitations Has Expired”
The defense will argue that the deadline to file has passed — that the exposure ended decades ago and the clock ran out long before the diagnosis. Some states do measure the statute of limitations from the last date of exposure, and in those states, this argument can be lethal. In states that apply the discovery rule, the defense will argue that you “should have known” about the disease earlier — that symptoms appeared years before diagnosis, that a chest X-ray showed abnormalities that you ignored, that you were warned about asbestos exposure and should have sought medical evaluation sooner.
Our counter: The discovery rule starts the clock at diagnosis, not at exposure — in most jurisdictions. The fraudulent-concealment doctrine can toll the clock further, because a defendant that actively hid the asbestos hazard cannot benefit from the delay it caused. But this is a state-specific fight, and the specific deadline in your jurisdiction must be confirmed immediately. The safest assumption is that the clock is real and running — and that calling a lawyer today is the only way to make sure it does not run out.
Play 3: “The Company Is Bankrupt — You Cannot Sue Us”
When a defendant has gone through bankruptcy and established an asbestos trust, it will argue that the trust is your only remedy and that you cannot pursue it in court. This is partially true — the bankruptcy channeling injunction does direct claims against the bankrupt entity to the trust — but it is not the whole story.
Our counter: The trust is one stream. Solvent defendants — manufacturers that did not go bankrupt, distributors, premises owners, successor corporations — remain suable in court. The bankruptcy of one defendant does not protect the others. And the trust claim is filed in parallel with the litigation, not instead of it. “That company is gone” is rarely the end of the story — the law preserved a fund specifically to compensate the people that company poisoned, and the fund is still paying claims.
Play 4: “You Assumed the Risk”
The defense will resurrect the argument that killed Anna Pirskowski’s case in 1934 — that the worker knew the job was dangerous and accepted the risk. Modern asbestos law has largely abolished this defense (just as the Federal Employers’ Liability Act abolished it for railroad workers), but defendants still raise it in modified form, arguing that the plaintiff knew about asbestos hazards by the 1970s and continued to work with the material anyway.
Our counter: The Sumner Simpson Papers. The industry’s own internal correspondence proves that the companies knew about the hazard and deliberately suppressed the information. A worker cannot “assume” a risk that the manufacturer was actively concealing. The duty to warn was the manufacturer’s, not the worker’s, and the manufacturer’s own documents prove it breached that duty with intent.
Play 5: The Quick Settlement Offer
Before the case is fully developed — before all defendants are identified, before all trusts are filed, before the full damages model is built — an adjuster may call with a settlement offer. It will sound like a lot of money. It will be a fraction of what the case is worth. The purpose of the early offer is to close the file cheaply before the plaintiff’s counsel has assembled the evidence that would justify a much larger number.
Our counter: We do not evaluate a case until the full exposure history is reconstructed, the product identification is developed, the trust claims are identified, and the damages model is built by a life-care planner and a forensic economist. The adjuster’s first offer is designed to be accepted before any of that work is done. We do the work first. Then we talk about numbers.
Play 6: The Surveillance and Social Media Watch
The defense will monitor the plaintiff’s social media and may conduct surveillance — looking for evidence that the plaintiff is less impaired than claimed, or that the plaintiff’s activities contradict their testimony about pain, disability, or quality of life.
Our counter: We tell every client from day one: assume you are being watched. Do not post about your activities, your treatment, your case, or your health on social media. A photograph of you at a family barbecue can be cropped and presented to a jury as evidence that you are “not really suffering.” The defense will take a moment of joy and try to turn it into a weapon. We prepare for that from the first phone call.
Your First 72 Hours After a Mesothelioma Diagnosis
The first 72 hours after a mesothelioma diagnosis are not about filing a lawsuit. They are about preserving the evidence that will make the lawsuit possible.
Hour 1 through hour 24. Focus on your health and your family. The diagnosis is devastating. The treatment plan is urgent. Be with the people you love. But before you sleep tonight, do one thing: ask your doctor or the hospital pathology department to preserve your biopsy tissue — the blocks and slides — for potential forensic analysis. Write down the request. Get it in writing. Those specimens are irreplaceable, and hospitals dispose of them on retention schedules.
Day one through day two. Start writing down your work history. Not a resume — a timeline. Every job you ever held, every employer, every year, every worksite. Include the type of work you performed (insulation, pipefitting, welding, boilermaking, carpentry, electrical, drywall, flooring, roofing, maintenance). Include the products you remember using or seeing. Do not worry about whether you remember the brand names — write down what you remember, and we will help fill in the gaps with product catalogs and co-worker testimony. Include military service, especially if you served in the Navy or worked in a shipyard.
Day two through day three. Identify co-workers. Think about the people you worked alongside — the men and women who were in the same space, doing the same work, at the same time. Write down their names. If you are in touch with any of them, call them. Ask if they remember what products were used. Their memories are fading, and their testimony may be the single most important piece of evidence in your case.
Day three. Call us. 1-888-ATTY-911. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win your case. We will ask you about your diagnosis, your work history, your military service, and your family. We will explain what happens next — the preservation letters, the records requests, the trust claims, the litigation timeline. And we will tell you honestly whether we are the right firm for your case — and if we are not, we will tell you who is.
What not to do. Do not sign anything from an insurance company. Do not give a recorded statement to anyone. Do not post about your diagnosis, your treatment, or your activities on social media. Do not throw away any old work documents, pay stubs, union cards, or photographs. Do not assume it is too late — the discovery rule may mean your rights just began.
The Refinery Worker: A Special Case
Many of the families who find us are refinery families — workers at Beaumont’s Motiva, ExxonMobil, and Valero refineries or at chemical plants along the Gulf Coast who spent decades inside units insulated with asbestos-containing materials. Refinery workers are among the most heavily exposed populations in American industry — the pipe insulation, the boiler coverings, the gaskets, the refractory, the vessel insulation, all of it was asbestos, and all of it was being cut, torn, removed, and replaced by workers who were never told what they were breathing.
The refinery case has a specific architecture. The exposure typically came from multiple products across multiple manufacturers — the insulation manufacturer, the gasket manufacturer, the refractory supplier, the scaffolding contractor, the turnaround contractor. The premises owner — the refinery itself — may bear separate liability for allowing the asbestos to remain in the unit, for failing to warn contract workers, and for failing to monitor the air. And the refinery workers’ exposure is often corroborated by a deep community of co-workers — the men and women who worked the same shifts in the same units and can testify about what they saw and handled.
But that community is aging. The insulators who worked the Beaumont refineries in the 1970s are in their seventies and eighties now. Their testimony — the single most powerful evidence in a refinery asbestos case — is on a clock. Every month that passes is another month of potential witnesses lost.
Why This Firm
Ralph P. Manginello is the Managing Partner of Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. He has been a licensed Texas trial attorney for 27+ years, admitted to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, including the Bankruptcy Court — which is where the asbestos trust-fund system lives. Ralph was a journalist before he was a lawyer, and he approaches every case the way a reporter approaches a story: he goes and finds the evidence, he reads the documents, he talks to the witnesses, and he builds the narrative that a jury can feel in their bones. He is a member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, the Houston Bar Association, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, among others. He hates losing, and the companies that poisoned their own workers are the opponents he chose this career to fight.
Lupe Peña is our Associate Attorney — a former insurance-defense attorney who spent years inside a national defense firm, in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims exactly like yours. Lupe knows how the other side values a case — how they set reserves in the first 48 hours, how they choose IME doctors, how they engineer recorded statements, how they use surveillance and social media — because he did it. Now he uses that knowledge for injured clients. Lupe is fluent in Spanish and conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter, because the families hit hardest by asbestos are often the ones whose language the insurance company does not bother to speak.
We are a Houston-based firm with offices in Austin and Beaumont — in the heart of the Gulf Coast refinery and petrochemical corridor where so many asbestos exposures occurred. We take cases statewide and work with local counsel across the country where required. Our fee is contingency — 33.33% before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win. The consultation is free, and it is confidential.
Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You will speak to a live person, not an answering service. We will listen to your story, explain your rights, and tell you honestly whether we are the right firm for your case. If we are, the preservation letters go out that week. If we are not, we will help you find the firm that is.
Hablamos Español. Your family does not have to speak English to get justice.
The companies that made the asbestos knew what it would do. They wrote it down in letters they never expected anyone to read. Those letters are in the public record now — and the law that was built on them is waiting for you to use it. The clock is running. The evidence is dying. The day you call is the day it starts working for you.
1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win.