Leadership In Law Podcast

S02E68 Asbestos Litigation Changes with Justinian Lane

• Marilyn Jenkins • Season 2 • Episode 68

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Justinian Lane’s grandfather survived World War II but later faced a deadly battle with asbestos exposure—an illness that impacted three generations of their family. This deeply personal experience inspired Lane to shift from a career in IT to becoming a dedicated advocate for asbestos victims, a powerful journey he shares in this compelling conversation. 

Lane explains how asbestos, once as widespread as plastic, is a hidden danger that was embedded in everyday life for decades. He vividly illustrates how its microscopic, razor-sharp fibers can travel long distances through the air and cause lasting lung damage, with effects that still impact lives years after exposure. 

Lane shares the most shocking part of the story: how corporations knowingly hid the dangers of asbestos. Some even x-rayed workers in secret to spot early signs of harm, then quietly reassigned them without explanation. These companies avoided responsibility by exploiting the decades-long gap between exposure and illness while workers remained in the dark. 

Lane highlights a growing focus in today’s litigation: cases involving contaminated cosmetic talc and “secondary exposure,” where people—often children—develop serious illnesses decades later just from handling a parent's asbestos-laced work clothes. His investigative work traces these exposures across generations, revealing both the legal complexities and the deep human toll of corporate negligence. 

Reach Justinian here:

www.asbestosclaims.law
833-4asbestos
YouTube: @asbestosclaimslaw

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Leadership in Law podcast with host Marilyn Jenkins. Cut through the noise, get actionable insights and inspiring stories delivered straight to your ears your ultimate podcast for navigating the ever-changing world of law firm ownership. In each episode, we dive deep into the critical topics that matter most to you, from unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard-won wisdom. So, whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. I'm your host, marilyn Jenkins. Please join me in welcoming my guest, justinian Lane, to the show today. Justinian founded Asbestos Claims Law in 2013 after seeing firsthand the devastating effects of asbestos exposure in his own family. His grandfather, a World War II veteran, along with his grandmother and father, all developed asbestos-related illnesses due to their work. That personal experience shaped his passion for advocating on behalf of victims and holding corporations accountable for putting profits over people's safety. In addition to his legal work, justinian commissions research on asbestos risks and is currently finishing a book on the subject. He's a strong voice in the fight against corporate negligence and an advocate for those harmed by asbestos exposure. I'm excited to have you here, justinian. Welcome, hey, thank you.

Speaker 3:

I'm glad to be here as well.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Tell us a bit about your journey.

Speaker 3:

Sure. So when I actually started out in my first career, I did IT stuff. I used to work for companies like Microsoft. I did backend sort of things, cloud stuff before we called it the cloud and then when the dot-com crash happened around 2000, everything I did got outsourced overseas and I went from being a valued professional to somebody who didn't have a job or a career path anymore and I was looking for, obviously, a way to reinvent myself.

Speaker 3:

And I'd always done a lot of work as a consultant doing computer work for law firms. So I was doing a little bit of that still on the side and they kind of shuffled me into a paralegal type of a role and it didn't take long before I discovered I actually really enjoyed what the practice of law entailed, with, you know, doing the research and finding an objectively correct answer and knowing if I have something you know that I can win a case with her. I really liked that sort of a thing. But I began the journey to go to law school and become an attorney. So that was a little later on in my life, in my late twenties, when I had to kind of reinvent myself.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that's, that's impressive. And so yeah, the dot-com bubble certainly made a lot of things change for a lot of people, certainly made a lot of things change for a lot of people. So you focus on asbestos claims and let's go to, like step one what is asbestos?

Speaker 3:

Sure, and you know this is a question a lot of people have. I know when I was growing up I'd see commercials about asbestos on TV, but people don't necessarily really know what it is. So I can actually I can show you Asbestos is. It's a mineral. There's actually six types of asbestos and the most common kind was 80 something percent, was called Chrysotile and this is what it actually looked like. I actually picked myself from a former asbestos mine that was involved in a case.

Speaker 3:

I had to kind of visit it and you can see, it's this fluffy substance and you can weave things into it, you can make gloves, you can make all kinds of things out of it.

Speaker 3:

So it's a mineral, it's fireproof and, among all of its other great properties of fireproof, heat resistant it's also very dangerous, and the reason that it's dangerous is because of the way that it forms. Now you understand, of course, that an ice cube and a glass of water are chemically identical, but if I throw an ice cube at your head, it's going to hurt more than maybe water. So this is the chrysotile of cestus, which is chemically identical to this rock If you looked at it under the microscope. This rock is a cestus chemically, but it didn't form the same way. Just like ice becomes a solid, a Asbestos formed into fibers that are tiny and needle sharp and when they go into your tissue and your lungs or other areas where you breathe or ingest it, they start causing scarring and other problems that over time that can lead to serious diseases like cancer. So asbestos basically is a mineral that can be woven or manipulated into other different shapes and it is very harmful if you breathe it or ingest it.

Speaker 2:

And maybe just I thought it was something used in schools years and years ago for the fireproof thing, so it's still being used.

Speaker 3:

Well, in this country we're not using it anymore. We started phasing it out in a little bit in the 70s and after the 80s and 90s there's been partial bans. About a year ago they finally finished it off here in the US. So we won't use it anymore. But the problem is that asbestos was used everywhere. So you mentioned schools. It would have been in the fireproof laboratory counters. It would have been in the blackboard, would have been in the walls all kinds. Asbestos was once as common as plastic is today. So if you were doing your business in the 50s or the 60s, you absolutely interacted with asbestos. If you lived in a city, there was no way not to. It touched every part of everybody's lives and today it's mostly forgotten, except, of course, when people get ill from the tragedy of breathing it in.

Speaker 2:

And that's the mesothelioma and the asbestosis, right, okay.

Speaker 3:

Right, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And how would I identify? So obviously we're not using it anymore, but how would I know or define if it's in my surroundings?

Speaker 3:

Sure. Now, if you were exposed, your exposure mostly would have been in the past, when you were younger. Today, if you live in an older home or work in an older building, possible asbestos might still be in there. We haven't built anything new with it since probably the 80s, but older buildings might still have that. If you see, you know the old classic asbestos floor tile kind of you know ugly vinyl tiles from the 70s. Those are fine unless they're damaged. So if you see them you don't have to worry about removing them unless they're damaged. The same thing with a lot of asbestos products. If it's called encapsulated, which means the fibers are trapped inside something else, it's not going to harm you then. So if you're in an older structure and there is damage you see visible damage to a wall, things like that you might have some issues you want to get taken care of. But by and large, if you don't disturb the materials and leave them where they are, you'll put them apart, you'll be fine.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and that's like you know. Obviously encapsulated means like so if you wanted to paint over, like, say, your siding, if you knew that your siding had asbestos that you painted over you would seal that in.

Speaker 3:

In a matter of speaking. Yes, like the siding and stuff is usually pretty sealed in because it's a type of asbestos cement. If you go and drill in it or damage it or do something you'll release the fibers, but for the most part if you leave it undisturbed it won't come out. Atbestos is dangerous. When they call it friable, that means broken into chunks and it can go into the air. And, as you saw, I mean these fibers are. They can be very thin and studies have shown that a single fiber on a windy day can travel over a mile and a half. Because these things take forever to finally set down. When they hit the ground, because they're so small, they just float.

Speaker 2:

Wow, okay, very interesting. And so tell us a bit about the. Obviously you're at the forefront of asbestos litigation. What does that look like? What does the future of that look like?

Speaker 3:

Sure, Right now one of the biggest areas in asbestos litigation is actually over cosmetic talc. You might have seen that Johnson Johnson's been in the news trying to do a bankruptcy of that talc. Now, talc is a mineral like asbestos, but the way talc forms is similar to, sometimes, the way asbestos will form and the two will combine in one. So you'll end up with a situation where you're mining talc but you're also mining a little bit of asbestos. And if you were to take, say, I don't know, a pound of sugar and just put a couple of drops of salt from the salt shaker in there and then shake that whole thing up, you're never getting the salt out, it's just in there. It's impossible, right. So that's what they ended up having with cosmetic tell that would be contaminated with a spasser. So a lot of women over the years primarily women have used cosmetic towels and they're actually they're dousing it on themselves and they're breathing asbestos virus.

Speaker 3:

Now, in the late 1990s my mother had ovarian cancer which thankfully she recovered from and is still alive and doing well today. At the time we just thought it was bad luck, but decades later we found out. Oh, actually, yes, I can still remember the shower-to-shower powder that she used and all of that asbestos, all of that talc was contaminated with asbestos. So you know her records were long since gone. There's nothing I could do, but in all likelihood her ovarian cancer was caused by asbestos and talc.

Speaker 3:

So a whole lot of the asbestos litigation these days is going after companies who knew that their asbestos was contaminated, or rather who knew that their tout was contaminated with asbestos. So that's one big area. And then, of course, the other big area that we're seeing a lot of is people who have what we call secondary exposure to asbestos. They didn't work primarily with it themselves. They resided in the home of somebody who did so. A lot of our clients today are actually the children of asbestos workers, who don't have any other real exposure to asbestos other than what their mom, or typically their dad, brought home on their work clothes, and they laundered the clothes and over time they got a dose of that in their own home and as they got older it caused problems. So that's what we're starting to see now.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so it's not going away, and so they've proven that the talc actually didn't contain and the company in New York contained asbestos.

Speaker 3:

Correct. There's multiple mines in the country where people get talc from and they all have some problem with asbestos contamination. Typically, what the companies try to do is play games about how little asbestos there really is. It's 99 point something percent pure. Okay, that's great, but there's still asbestos in it and science has come to the conclusion that there is no known safe dose of asbestos. What that doesn't mean if you breathe even a little bit, you're going to get sick. What that means is, if you breathe even a tiny bit of it, we can't guarantee that you won't get sick. So even a small exposure from maybe some cosmetic talc or something else that has a little bit of a substance years and years later can cause serious illnesses. The typical the period is called the latency period between when you were exposed and when you get sick, and it's not uncommon to have that latency period be 50 or even 60 years. But the problems from asbestos are coming to us today because people were exposed 40, 50, 60 years ago.

Speaker 2:

Okay, wow, that's incredible. And seeing it as children, then if they're exposed as a child and they grieve the sand, then obviously, as they continue to develop and grow into adults, that just exacerbates the problem.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. And you see children. They have, of course, smaller lungs and lung tissues because they're still growing adults right, or they haven't grown into adults. Asbestos causes mechanical damage to your lungs, just like dabbing a toothpick into your lung is kind of what that asbestos fiber is. But tiny lungs, those fibers are bigger, so it's going to do more damage. And studies have shown that when children have been exposed to pollutants like asbestos at a very young age, that stunts their development and their lungs never get to be as good as they should.

Speaker 3:

We've seen a lot of clients recently who are in their mid-50s or sometimes even a little earlier, who've never smoked and their lungs are in terrible condition. You can objectively see it. The doctors look on the x-ray and then you take a breath test that measures it and you see people with terrible, terrible lungs and the only conclusion we can come to it must've been the asbestos that was brought into the home. We had one client who was a school teacher. She did nothing around asbestos ever, except her dad worked in a refinery. She washed and clothed and was exposed to it on a daily basis for years that way.

Speaker 2:

Wow, okay, so that's. I didn't realize it's such a long long-term latency period as you were saying. Yeah, so I see advertisements on TV for mesothelioma and things like that, and is that something that you help with? That's part of the asbestos problem.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely the most serious disease that asbestos can cause is mesothelioma. That's a cancer that affects a lining of our organs called the mesothelium. It's basically a cellophane-thin membrane that provides lubrication, so when our lungs are moving in our test it doesn't hurt. So when that gives cancer it's very painful and that's the most serious disease and we do that, of course. But there's also lung cancer that asbestos can cause and the signature disease asbestosis, which is caused only by asbestos.

Speaker 2:

Okay, interesting, very interesting, and this is so. This that is surely the latency is the reason that we're not going to see the end of asbestos litigation anytime soon x-rays and they could see okay, there's a little bit of damage.

Speaker 3:

At some point, years from now he might have a problem. So their strategy was they would then transfer those workers to a non-dusty job. Maybe now you're in the mail room, maybe you're doing something else. So that way, by the time they did get sick, they wouldn't associate it with their aesthetic exposure and they wouldn't see the company because of all that. Years of latency. That's how they got away with that.

Speaker 2:

Oh, my goodness, okay, and then that's something that you're working with. So you're tracking back when someone comes in, you're tracking back to what their parents did for a living, where they lived, all of that, and getting a complete history on that person to really pinpoint where their issues began.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely the most critical factor that determines how much money that a client can get in an asbestos lawsuit is who can you pursue? How many companies expose them to asbestos? The more of the companies that you can identify, the more companies that you can sue and the more settlements that you can collect. So the most important thing that we do is the detective work. Where did you live? Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? What did your dad do? Did you have other workers? You know family members that worked around things. The more different avenues of exposure we can find, the more avenues of recovery there are. That's why we spend so much time researching and delving into all of the history, because when a client comes to us, we have to figure out what they were doing 40 years ago, not what they were doing yesterday.

Speaker 2:

Okay, very interesting. And if you say what types of cancer would, you would ring a bell as thinking okay, maybe we need to look at asbestos being the cause of that.

Speaker 3:

Sure, the most bigotrous type of cancer for me is mesothelioma. Doctors estimate over 90% of those cases are caused by asbestos exposure. The next type of cancer that's caused by asbestos is lung cancer. Now, lung cancer can be caused by a lot of things. Type of cancer caused by asbestos is lung cancer. Now, lung cancer can be caused by a lot of things, of course, including smoking. But if you smoke and you are exposed to asbestos, you're far more likely to get lung cancer than if you just smoke or you were just exposed to asbestos.

Speaker 3:

So anybody who has lung cancer at all I would advise take a look. Maybe there could be asbestos. And even if you're a smoker, that may not be the whole story. There's also lung cancer, I'm sorry. Throat cancer, laryngeal and pharyngeal, stomach cancer and colorectal cancer and ovarian cancer. All of those types of cancers have connections directly to asbestos. Lots of other cancer types do not. Last year I had thyroid cancer. I had my thyroid removed. Thyroid cancer has no connection to asbestos and you can bet that. I looked that up just to make sure. But there are certain types that, yep, asbestos could have caused it. Other types, absolutely not. Another one we get asked all the time prostate cancer not caused by asbestos exposure and lots of other potential causes. Asbestos isn't one. Basically, asbestos has to embed itself into tissue somehow. That's how it causes the illness. So if you don't inhale it or ingest it, it won't hurt you.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and do you look at like? So we're looking back at where these kids went to elementary school and if it was a really old school building. So I went to elementary school where one building on campus was the real original, really really old, built in like the 18th, which I think was crazy, you know and then, of course, the new building. So is that a concern, or is there a period of time of when it was more used in our construction materials?

Speaker 3:

Sure, I would say that the real payday was probably from the 1930s through the 1970s. The asbestos industry began in the late 1880s, roughly in there, and by the time, you know, the late 20s, early 30s had come along. They were using it everywhere. World War II came along, we started using it even more. So, like the post-war boom, all of the building, all of that would have had asbestos in it. So, like the post-war boom, all of the building, all of that would have had asbestos in it by 72,. Osha had come along and was starting to regulate asbestos. So it wasn't used quite as much. And by the mid-80s, very little. Asbestos was still being used to build much of anything outside of super specialty stuff. So your real issue is anything, say, between 1930 and 1980, early 80s. That's when you're most likely to have had it built with asbestos.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and would that be something like what our military guys have been exposed to in any of the things that they were working with?

Speaker 3:

Oh, absolutely. Asbestos was used extensively throughout the military. The people who got the biggest dose were in the Navy. And the historical reasons why the Navy used asbestos there's a couple. I mean, first of all, fire at sea is just deadly. You've got nowhere to go right, so they wanted to do everything for fireproofing. Another advantage that asbestos had was it was substantially lighter than other materials, and after World War I we had entered into treaties where our ships couldn't weigh more than a certain amount of tons. They did the math and they realized well, if we use asbestos we've saved this many tons, but now we can load up with guns and ammo. So the Navy had tons of exposure to asbestos, but so did every other branch because it would have been used and being built in barracks.

Speaker 3:

Any aircraft in the era would have had asbestos throughout it. Hanks would have any automobile. I mean we even left asbestos on the moon. It was part of the Apollo capsule. So anything that people did in an industrial era in the 60s or 70s, they would have had exposure to asbestos. And also in the military for some period of time. A number of ammunition manufacturers used it as wadding in the shells, so that when people are shooting. They're actually getting a small dose of the specimen.

Speaker 2:

Oh, interesting. Okay, so you said that there's like six different types or forms of the specimen, so basically, the one that's most popular is the one that will cause the most damage to humans.

Speaker 3:

Well, they all can cause damage and the thing is that what makes the specimen valuable is if the fibers can be long enough. There's a few types where the fibers are too short. It never really got much commercial use, but the biggest, most popular one was called Chrysotile. That was the one I showed you in the jar. It was mined primarily up in Canada, although here in Arizona we did have a couple of small mines. Then the other two that were used commercially were called Chrysotilite and Amethyte. Those only come from Africa and Australia and they were more specialty products. So like the Navy used amosite because it was really good for insulation on ships, Chrysidolite would resist acid so it would be in chemical plants, refineries.

Speaker 3:

But for the most part chrysotile was the asbestos that everybody used. It was sometimes called white asbestos because it looks white and they all can cause all the different types of cancers and illnesses. Chrysotile is a little less likely than that chrysotilite or amycite, but it's still very deadly. The majority of cancers and mesotheliomas caused by asbestos are from chrysotile, because that's the majority of asbestos out there. Okay, Christ child, because that's the majority of the stuff that's out there.

Speaker 2:

Okay, all right. So it does seem like it's. It's going to be a long, a long-term battle to to for so many people to be ill is so, you say we. They finally turned it on for said bandits. So what other types of legislation are you thinking would would reshape the landscape of asbestos and pain in that way?

Speaker 3:

Sure, in this country now we don't have there's no more asbestos being used. It's finally been banned. What we really need for legislation-wise is some things to help protect the, especially the innocent children that were exposed. A lot of them aren't going to be able to get as much compensation as they're entitled to because they didn't work directly with these products and they can't name them.

Speaker 3:

For example, if your dad worked in a refinery, you don't know what product that he worked with. You just know you breathe some asbestos. So we do everything we can for these people and we can still do pretty well, but it's difficult. If somebody you know today is in their 60s and their dad passed away decades ago, they just know he brought it home. We have to do that detective work to figure out what it might have been and prove that. It'd be really helpful if somebody in the legislature would try to look at truly innocent people who are just the children and come up with some sort of a solution to lower a burden of proof or something along the lines, so these people can get some compensation for having their entire lung.

Speaker 2:

So we banned it, so we're not using it in manufacturing or anything like that anymore. What are we doing, or can something be done so we're not importing products that are using it?

Speaker 3:

That was one of the last pieces is we don't import the stuff anymore. I think it was in the last years when that happened. It had only been used for some really specialized stuff like price to title assessments were used a lot for special filters for making chlorine in an industrial scale. So they had found other ways of doing it. But for the last 10, 15 years at least, any uses of it in this country were super specialized. The rest of the world they still have massive mines operating in China and Russia and I've seen videos from inside the plants because they're proud of what they're making. I just shake my head seeing all this dust and realizing you guys are going to kill a generation of your people a decade from now. But the product is cheap, so they're happy with it.

Speaker 2:

Very interesting. This has been a very interesting conversation. I appreciate all the research you're doing and you're working on a book as well. Is that going to be for education purposes, for everyone? Is it to help get law students or the clients going? What's the premise of your book?

Speaker 3:

Sure, I put together a kind of a lexicon, a guide to all of the specialized terminology, because the festus litigation touches medicine, it touches law, it touches science, it even touches a little bit of mining and mineralogical terms. So for anybody who, god forbid, has one of these diseases, or somebody who's in asbestos legal industry and wants a better place to learn and understand, we're gathering all those and putting them together, because some of the terms are pretty technical and it's not always the easiest to find out where to go. Asbestos is kind of it's a bit of a niche. There's not a lot of firms that do this, so it's not. You know, if you want to learn about car wrecks, it's pretty easy, but if you want to learn about asbestos, you have to dig a little deeper.

Speaker 2:

Okay, fantastic. So we want to definitely watch for your book to come out and I know when this is. I probably kind of want to connect with you, learn more about you and, of course, if they have a claim and want to talk about it, where's the best place for them to read you?

Speaker 3:

The website is asbestosclaimslaw and our phone number is 833-4-asbestos. We're also on social media. On YouTube we have lots of videos at Asbestos Claims Law on YouTube. We have a really nice one. It's a five-part video series called Asbestos 101, where we go everything from how the mineral was formed all through litigation. So that's about probably a three and a half hour video series If anybody's really interested it's right there.

Speaker 2:

Okay, fantastic. Well, it sounds like you've got a great resource for people and I'll just encourage people to reach out to you. I'll make sure that the phone number and the URLs are in the show notes and, justina, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This has been quite interesting.

Speaker 3:

Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to come on and talk to your viewers.

Speaker 4:

Thanks for joining me today for this episode. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast. Second, you can connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about. And if you're ready to take the next step with a digital strategist to help you grow your law firm, I'd be honored to help you. Just go to lawmarketingzonecom to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, thanks for listening to Leadership in Law podcast and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. Remember you're not alone on this journey. There's a whole community of law firm owners out there facing similar challenges and striving for the same success. Head over to our website at lawmarketingzonecom. From there, connect with other listeners, access valuable resources and stay up to date on the latest episodes. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, keep leading with vision and keep growing your firm.

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