MadCo: Where 1,200 Out-of-State Lawsuits is a Dip

The final numbers are in for Madison County, Illinois, named the nation’s “epicenter for asbestos litigation” in the recently released Judicial Hellholes report.

Madison County hosted 1,300 new asbestos lawsuit filings in 2014, The Madison-St. Clair Record reports today.

While MadCo saw a 20% drop from 1,678 in 2013, the decrease is due in large part to surge of lung cancer cases with questionable ties to asbestos filed the previous year.

While, in 2013, the Napoli firm filed one-third of the 1,678 asbestos lawsuits filed in the county, most of which were lung cancer cases, Napoli’s lawsuits constituted just 10% of the 2014 filings.

Madison County’s asbestos docket has doubled in the last four years and tripled in the last seven. As documented in the Judicial Hellholes report, the 2014 total is below the 2012 filing rate (which at the time set an all-time record with 1,563), but is well above the numbers from previous years (953 in 2011; 752 in 2010, 814 in 2009; 639 in 2008; and 455 in 2007).

Similar to past years, The Record reports that nine of ten plaintiffs who filed in Madison County in 2014 don’t live in Illinois (1,191 out of 1,300). And just a dozen of the plaintiffs–less than 1%–live in Madison County.