Turning up the Heat on Asbestos Racketeers

As the push continues to expose and punish that lowly element of the plaintiffs’ bar that lies, cheats and manipulates civil courts and abestos trust funds to maximize their profits, ethics and justice be damned, ATRA offers up links to both a recent editorial and a Pennsylvania television interview that help make the tort reformers’ case.

The Wall Street Journal editorial, “Busting the Asbestos Racket” was published this past weekend and highlights a case previously noted on this site, in which a federal judge has offered a scathing critique of the plaintiffs’ lawyers who tried to run a scam on defendant Garlock Sealing Technologies, Inc.

“For years lawyers have deluged courts with claims, confident that neither defendants nor courts will have the time or money to sort through the scams,” wrote the Journal.  “Garlock, which is trying to emerge from bankruptcy, took a courageous risk in taking on the tort bar in court. It now plans to use the information it found in discovery as the basis for a racketeering, fraud and conspiracy suit against four national asbestos plaintiffs firms—Shein Law Center, Belluck & Fox, Simon Greenstone, and Waters & Kraus.”

In Pennsylvania, where lawmakers are expected this year to consider legislation that would bring much needed transparency to the adminstration of asbestos bankruptcy trusts and lawsuits, the National Federation of Independent Business‘s state executive director Kevin Shivers recorded an interview with Comcast Newsmakers that began airing this week throughout the state.

Shivers explains to listeners how fraud on our civil courts by plaintiffs’ lawyers takes a toll on every Pennsylvania taxpayer and jobseeker, and he makes the case for passage of the reform bill that would make it harder for asbestos plaintiffs and their lawyers to perpetrate the kind of double-dipping fraud that has been rampant for years thoughout the country.