News

May 17, 2018 In Stearns v. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., the Massachusetts District Court, Zobel, J., addressed whether the Massachusetts statute of repose for certain tort actions, codified as Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 260 § 2B (“Section 2B”), applies to asbestos claims. In Stearns, the plaintiffs brought a wrongful death […]

May 17, 2018 The court in Dougan v. Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. was faced with the issue of whether Connecticut tort law permits, or should permit, recovery based on asbestos exposure in the absence of any present clinical injury or physical symptoms of an asbestos-related illness or disease. 2017 Conn. Super. […]

May 8, 2018 There are perhaps few legal principles as widely debated as the principle of duty. In order to establish negligence, the plaintiff must show that the defendant owed him a duty of care. If there is no legal duty, then a case will usually meet its end through […]

May 8, 2018 In a rare turn of events, on April 30 2018, Judge Alice B. Gibney vacated her prior judgment denying G.E.’s motion for summary judgment when presented with a Rule 60(b) Motion for Relief from Order filed by the defeated Defendant. Contrary to her earlier stance, Judge Gibney, […]

May 3, 2018 On April 20, 2018, Judge Harry Calmar, who presides over the asbestos docket in New London Superior Court, granted Defendant, Pefection HY-Test Company’s (“ Perfection”), motion to dismiss all claims against it for lack of personal jurisdiction pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States, in […]

May 3, 2018 Baumgartner v. Am. Std., Inc. is an interesting Rhode Island case which applied Ohio law, as the state of Ohio had the most significant relationship to the instant asbestos litigation. 2015 R.I. Super. LEXIS 91 (R.I. Super. Ct. 2015). The decision by Judge Gibney, the presiding asbestos […]

May 1, 2018 In Connecticut, many products liability actions involving asbestos exposure have involved General Dynamics Electric Boat, a subsidiary of the General Dynamics Corporation, which has built submarines for the U.S. Navy for decades in the Town of Groton. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that in Paquin v. […]

April 30, 2018 The plaintiff, Marsha Lagerberg, individually and in her capacity as Executrix of the Estate of Erick Lagerberg, filed a petition for a new trial almost two years after the jury verdict in Lagerberg v. Rogers Corporation was reached in 2015. In that case, the plaintiff alleged that […]

April 10, 2018 It is an obvious tenet of an asbestos action that in order to establish asbestos exposure from a product, there must have been a product that contained asbestos. From the perspective of a defense attorney, the failure of a plaintiff to specifically identify an asbestos-containing product seems […]