Mesothelioma, Asbestos & Toxic Exposure
These cases are built backwards, out of a working life that ended long before the diagnosis arrived. The medicine is rarely the contested part. The exposure history is.
Occupational, take-home and product exposure; industrial and environmental toxins.
What asbestos and toxic exposure cases does The Biggest Cases handle?
Mesothelioma and other asbestos-related disease arising from occupational, take-home and product exposure, together with industrial and environmental toxic exposure claims. The practice is licensed in Illinois and Florida and brings these matters with local co-counsel where the case is filed. It accepts referrals from other attorneys as a standing part of the practice.
01What belongs in this category
Mesothelioma and other asbestos-related disease from occupational exposure — trades, plants, shipyards, powerhouses, refineries, construction — and from products used by people who never worked in any of them.
Take-home exposure belongs here as well: the family member who laundered work clothing for a working lifetime and was never on a job site. So do the industrial and environmental exposures that involve no asbestos at all, where a workforce or a community shares a contaminant and then shares a disease.
Category eight and category nine sit beside each other for a reason. One is exposure accumulated across decades. The other is a single event at the same kind of facility.
02The exposure history is the case
Everything turns on establishing where the exposure happened and to whose product. That is reconstructed from a working life: employment records, union and pension histories, job-site documents, purchase and specification records, and the memory of people who worked alongside the person decades ago.
The interview is the most important work in the file, and its deadline is not a legal one. Where the diagnosis is advanced, the person who can identify a product by sight and name the foreman who ordered it may not be available later. Co-workers age out of the case at the same rate.
Latency is what makes this unlike the other categories. Exposure precedes diagnosis by decades, which means the companies involved have merged, dissolved or been reorganised, and the documents identifying their products sit in places nobody has looked at in a generation.
03Many defendants, one disease
A single disease usually has many sources across a working life, and the case is brought against whichever of them can be identified and reached. Some are solvent operating companies. Others resolved their liabilities in bankruptcy and now pay through trusts, on published criteria and an entirely separate track.
Running both tracks together is ordinary practice and carries obligations. Disclosure of trust claims, set-off, and the sequencing of trust submissions against a pending suit are governed by rules that vary by jurisdiction and have tightened in several of them.
The result is a case with an unusual shape: a medical picture that is rarely disputed, an exposure history that is disputed constantly, and a defendant list that keeps changing as the history is reconstructed.
04For referring attorneys
These matters arrive late by their nature and are frequently held by a firm that has never run one. The workup is specialised, the document universe is decades old, and the first weeks matter more than in almost any other category because of who is still available to testify.
Zayed Law runs a separate property dedicated to asbestos matters, and the categories on this site overlap it by design. Where a matter is the better fit for that practice it gets pointed there rather than kept, and either way the arrangement with the referring attorney is agreed in writing first.
Listing a case category describes the matters this practice accepts. It is not a statement that the firm has obtained any particular result in that category, and no outcome should be inferred from it. Prior results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future matter. A trial firm licensed in Illinois and Florida, handling catastrophic injury and complex liability matters nationwide through a co-counsel network.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, and it should not be read that way. This describes the matters the firm accepts. No case results appear on this site outside the results page, and no outcome in any category should be inferred from that category being listed here.
Not necessarily. In most states the limitation clock for a latent disease runs from diagnosis, or from when the disease was reasonably discoverable, rather than from the exposure that caused it — precisely because the two are separated by decades. Which rule applies depends on the governing state, and it is a threshold question worth answering early rather than assuming in either direction.
It is common, and usually not. Product identification is reconstructed rather than recalled — from employment and union records, job-site specifications and purchase orders, co-worker testimony, and depositions taken in earlier cases at the same site. Someone who cannot name a brand can often describe the work, and the work identifies the products.
Founder Adam Zayed is a Licensed Illinois and Florida Attorney, and partner Andrew Miller is a Licensed Illinois and Florida Attorney. A matter governed by another state's law is brought with local co-counsel admitted there, which is the ordinary way any firm reaches a case outside its own admissions.
The arrangement is settled first and in writing — whether you stay in as co-counsel with an active role or refer the matter outright, and how fees divide under the rules of the governing jurisdiction. That happens before the case moves, not afterwards.
Tell us what happened
Case reviews are free and confidential. Attorneys holding a matter in this category can use the same form to open a referral conversation.