i represented a school guidance
counselor
59 years old
and i met him because i was
in
a mentor program that
he ran that
not so coincidentally my law partner
lulu flores helped establish it
a middle school in austin
i got drafted into it as a result of
that and
it was
a great experience i
mentored a 12 year old
seventh grader who was at that school
but by being in that program i met this
guidance counselor who ran it
and
early on in the school year
he was absent for
extended periods of time and finally
he sent an email to all that mentors in
the program
that he had recently been diagnosed with
this rare cancer called mesothelioma he
had no idea how he developed it
or where he could have been exposed to
asbestos because of course asbestos
is the singular cause of mesothelioma in
almost everyone who is diagnosed with it
mesothelioma really is the signature
cancer of asbestos exposure well it just
so happened that one of his colleagues
at the school
had been on a jury
in another mesothelioma case that i
tried
and she
urged him to talk to me about it
he ended up hiring me
and i sat down with him in a room off
the school library and we sat down for
about an hour and a half and i said all
right you have no idea where you were
exposed to asbestos
let’s just work backward this was 2007
and we went backwards every year
what job did you do okay let’s go back
to 2006 let’s go back to 2005.
by the time we got to 1968
he told me about a summer job he had in
college
cutting asbestos cement pipe
well he didn’t know it was asbestos
cement pipe he just knew it was cement
water pipe
and as soon as i heard that i realized
that that was the source of asbestos
because
those pipes were traditionally made with
asbestos
i remember him telling me he was in long
beach california and he looked up on the
side of the building where he was
working
because he was working in an outside
yard
cutting these uh pipes he saw a big
billboard for john’s manville and i
thought well john manville is bankrupt
they’re out of business there’s really
probably not much we’re going to be able
to do
and he said no i think these pipes came
from japan
and i said chris how could they have
come from japan they made them right
there in california how could it be
financially competitive for a japanese
company to ship
such heavy pipes across the pacific from
japan to california
he said i’m sure they came from japan he
said what i understood is that the cargo
ship coming from japan with this load of
cement pipes
encountered a storm at sea
and as a result all of the cargo shifted
and when it shifted the pipes hit each
other and the ends broke and chipped so
when they got to long beach california
his job was to recut the ends of every
one of those pipes and he spent four
months doing nothing but that and all he
had was a face shield
no respirator no mask well when you’re
using a high speed carbide
grinding wheel or blade to cut a cement
pipe it shoots a jet stream of dust
right at you
so the face shield blocked the tiny
particles of cement
but not the dust that he was breathing
all day every day for four months and
what we discovered is that the japanese
government
in the early 1960s was heavily
subsidizing subsidizing their industries
to get competitive after world war ii
and they subsidized
the cost of manufacturing and shipping
this pipe to the united states and
that’s how they could compete when we
realized that was the source of the pipe
we did a lot of investigation in fact my
law partner lulu flores and i even went
to japan and
interviewed
experts and people
who
knew about the manufacturing plant that
was there in fact
the plant was in the middle of a
residential community in a small
japanese city of 400 000 people called
amigasaki
and
as a result of it being in the middle of
a residential neighborhood there were
over a thousand cases of mesothelioma in
people who just lived around the plant
this was referred to in japan as kubota
shock
that’s the rough translation because so
many people had been exposed to this
deadly asbestos
in the middle of a residential
neighborhood where they were
manufacturing it well we went after the
japanese company because they had a u.s
affiliate a u.s subsidiary here and we
also went after the distributor of the
pipe who our client worked for
well that distributor had an exclusive
deal with this japanese company
and there was a lot of evidence that
we were trying to develop about their
business relationship
well their defense lawyers told us well
the the president owner of this
distributor he’s not well enough to
testify so his daughter who was
secretary of the company
is going to testify
so we were taking the deposition of the
owner’s daughter who was secretary of
the company
to try to find out where all the records
were
uh about the business relationship
between the distributor her father’s
company
and the manufacturer in japan and as we
were cross-examining her and boxing her
in question by question
she finally
just said i can’t do this anymore i’m
not gonna lie anymore i don’t care what
my lawyers told me i have all the
records they’re at my father’s ranch in
a storage room and they told me not to
tell you and the lawyer for her was
jumping in and instructing her not to
answer and trying to stop the deposition
and it was a true
perry mason moment
and that just
opened up the case and as a result the
case settled for
uh a very significant amount and it was
uh
uh the settlement actually
occurred after three exhaustive days of
negotiation
the
the decision makers for the japanese
company and their insurance company
asked us to come in
to a settlement conference between
christmas and new year’s
because the trial was starting at the
end of january or the beginning of
february
so they asked us to meet them halfway in
hawaii
we flew to hawaii
we spent three days in a
basement conference room of one of the
hotels on waikiki beach never seeing the
light of day never seeing the beach
never getting to really enjoy hawaii but
we negotiated non-stop for three days
and finally produced a very significant
settlement and
we were able to report to our client the
settlement at night it was about nine
o’clock at night
in hawaii which made it about
1am in texas where he was
but we called him
and
he was
elated at the result and that he was
able to see
the the the closure of the case and the
result of the case and
ironically he died about six weeks later
the day before we were going to start
trial
