Mesothelioma Attorney in Austin, Texas
Can you tell us about a memorable mesothelioma case you handled?
Can you tell us about a memorable mesothelioma case you handled?
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00:04
i represented a school guidance
00:07
counselor
00:09
59 years old
00:11
and i met him because i was
00:15
in
00:16
a mentor program that
00:19
he ran that
00:21
not so coincidentally my law partner
00:23
lulu flores helped establish it
00:26
a middle school in austin
00:29
i got drafted into it as a result of
00:31
that and
00:33
it was
00:34
a great experience i
00:35
mentored a 12 year old
00:38
seventh grader who was at that school
00:41
but by being in that program i met this
00:44
guidance counselor who ran it
00:47
and
00:48
early on in the school year
00:50
he was absent for
00:53
extended periods of time and finally
00:56
he sent an email to all that mentors in
00:58
the program
01:00
that he had recently been diagnosed with
01:02
this rare cancer called mesothelioma he
01:05
had no idea how he developed it
01:09
or where he could have been exposed to
01:10
asbestos because of course asbestos
01:14
is the singular cause of mesothelioma in
01:17
almost everyone who is diagnosed with it
01:20
mesothelioma really is the signature
01:23
cancer of asbestos exposure well it just
01:26
so happened that one of his colleagues
01:28
at the school
01:29
had been on a jury
01:31
in another mesothelioma case that i
01:33
tried
01:34
and she
01:36
urged him to talk to me about it
01:38
he ended up hiring me
01:40
and i sat down with him in a room off
01:44
the school library and we sat down for
01:47
about an hour and a half and i said all
01:49
right you have no idea where you were
01:50
exposed to asbestos let’s just work
01:53
backward this was 2007
01:56
and we went backwards every year
01:59
what job did you do okay let’s go back
02:01
to 2006 let’s go back to 2005.
02:04
by the time we got to 1968
02:08
he told me about a summer job he had in
02:11
college
02:12
cutting asbestos cement pipe
02:14
well he didn’t know it was asbestos
02:16
cement pipe he just knew it was cement
02:18
water pipe
02:20
and as soon as i heard that i realized
02:22
that that was the source of asbestos
02:24
because
02:26
those pipes were traditionally made with
02:29
asbestos
02:30
i remember him telling me he was in long
02:32
beach california and he looked up on the
02:35
side of the building where he was
02:37
working
02:38
because he was working in an outside
02:41
yard
02:42
cutting these uh pipes he saw a big
02:45
billboard for john’s manville and i
02:47
thought well john manville is bankrupt
02:50
they’re out of business there’s really
02:52
probably not much we’re going to be able
02:53
to do
02:54
and he said no i think these pipes came
02:56
from japan
02:58
and i said chris how could they have
03:00
come from japan they made them right
03:02
there in california how could it be
03:04
financially competitive for a japanese
03:08
company to ship
03:09
such heavy pipes across the pacific from
03:12
japan to california
03:15
he said i’m sure they came from japan he
03:17
said what i understood is that the cargo
03:20
ship coming from japan with this load of
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cement pipes
03:24
encountered a storm at sea
03:27
and as a result all of the cargo shifted
03:30
and when it shifted the pipes hit each
03:32
other and the ends broke and chipped so
03:36
when they got to long beach california
03:39
his job was to recut the ends of every
03:42
one of those pipes and he spent four
03:44
months doing nothing but that and all he
03:47
had was a face shield
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no respirator no mask well when you’re
03:52
using a high speed carbide
03:55
grinding wheel or blade to cut a cement
03:58
pipe it shoots a jet stream of dust
04:01
right at you
04:02
so the face shield blocked the tiny
04:05
particles of cement
04:07
but not the dust that he was breathing
04:09
all day every day for four months and
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what we discovered is that the japanese
04:14
government in the early 1960s was
04:17
heavily subsidizing subsidizing their
04:20
industries
04:21
to get competitive after world war ii
04:24
and they subsidized
04:27
the cost of manufacturing and shipping
04:29
this pipe to the united states and
04:31
that’s how they could compete
04:33
when we realized that was the source of
04:35
the pipe we did a lot of investigation
04:38
in fact my law partner lulu flores and i
04:41
even went to japan
04:42
and interviewed
04:45
experts and people who
04:47
knew about the manufacturing plant that
04:50
was there in fact
04:52
the plant was in the middle of a
04:54
residential community in a small
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japanese city of 400 000 people called
05:01
amigasaki
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and
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as a result of it being in the middle of
05:06
a residential neighborhood there were
05:08
over a thousand cases of mesothelioma in
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people who just lived around the plant
05:14
this was referred to in japan as kubota
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shock
05:19
that’s the rough translation because so
05:22
many people had been exposed to this
05:25
deadly asbestos
05:27
in the middle of a residential
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neighborhood where they were
05:29
manufacturing it well we went after the
05:32
japanese company because they had a u.s
05:34
affiliate a u.s subsidiary here and we
05:37
also went after the distributor of the
05:39
pipe who our client worked for
05:42
well that distributor had an exclusive
05:46
deal with this japanese company
05:50
and there was a lot of evidence that
05:53
we were trying to develop about their
05:57
business relationship
05:58
well their defense lawyers told us well
06:01
the the president owner of this
06:03
distributor he’s not well enough to
06:05
testify so his daughter who was
06:08
secretary of the company
06:10
is going to testify
06:12
so we were taking the deposition of the
06:14
owner’s daughter who was secretary of
06:16
the company
06:18
to try to find out where all the records
06:20
were uh about the business relationship
06:23
between the distributor her father’s
06:25
company
06:26
and the manufacturer in japan
06:29
and as we were cross-examining her and
06:31
boxing her in question by question
06:34
she finally
06:36
just said i can’t do this anymore i’m
06:38
not going to lie anymore i don’t care
06:40
what my lawyers told me i have all the
06:42
records they’re at my father’s ranch in
06:45
a storage room and they told me not to
06:48
tell you and the lawyer for her was
06:50
jumping in and instructing her not to
06:52
answer and trying to stop the deposition
06:54
and it was a true
06:56
perry mason moment
06:58
and that just
07:00
opened up the case and as a result the
07:02
case settled for
07:03
uh a very significant amount and it was
07:08
uh
07:10
uh the settlement actually
07:12
occurred after three exhaustive days of
07:16
negotiation
07:17
the
07:18
the decision makers for the japanese
07:20
company and their insurance company
07:23
asked us to come in
07:25
to a settlement conference between
07:27
christmas and new years
07:29
because the trial was starting at the
07:31
end of january or the beginning of
07:33
february
07:34
so they asked us to meet them halfway in
07:36
hawaii
07:37
we flew to hawaii
07:39
we spent three days in a
07:42
basement conference room of one of the
07:44
hotels on waikiki beach never seeing the
07:47
light of day never seeing the beach
07:50
never getting to really enjoy hawaii but
07:52
we negotiated non-stop for three days
07:56
and finally produced a very significant
07:58
settlement and
08:00
we were able to
08:01
report to our client the settlement at
08:04
night it was about nine o’clock at night
08:07
in hawaii which made it about 1am in
08:10
texas where he was
08:12
but we called him
08:14
and
08:15
he was
08:16
elated at the result and that he was
08:19
able to see
08:21
the the the closure of the case and the
08:24
result of the case and
08:27
ironically he died about six weeks later
08:30
the day before we were going to start
08:32
trial
Austin, TX personal injury attorney Scott Hendler shares the story of a memorable mesothelioma case he handled.
