ATRA’s New ‘Asbestos Litigation Watch’ Website Will Help Make Case for Reform
Current ‘Plundering’ of Bankruptcy Trusts and Solvent Companies Erodes Capacity to Compensate Future Asbestos Injuries
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 2, 2015 – Citing recent events that have further exposed the “corruption and outright fraud that have long been endemic to asbestos litigation,” the American Tort Reform Association today launched a new website that “will document the overwhelming case for substantive reforms.”
“First there were the phony chest x-rays exposed by CSX Transportation’s successful racketeering lawsuit, upheld by an appeals court last year, against two Pittsburgh-based personal injury lawyers and a discredited radiologist,” began ATRA president Tiger Joyce.
“Also last year, a federal judge presiding over the bankruptcy of Garlock Sealing Technologies in North Carolina found that asbestos law firms routinely manipulated evidence of asbestos exposures when pursuing claims with both bankruptcy trusts and through our civil courts.
“And the Jan. 22 arrest and subsequent indictment of New York’s previously most powerful politician for corrupting asbestos claims in the nation’s #1 Judicial Hellhole has now laid bare trial lawyers’ undue influence over the judiciary,” Joyce continued. “So with all the attention these and other events are getting from the media and policymakers, the case for asbestos litigation reform at both state and federal levels has never been more open and shut.”
Joyce said that the new ATRA website, AsbestosLitigationWatch.org, will serve as “a clearing house for bullet-proof documentation of the fraud and rampant abuse that has truly scandalized America’s longest running mass tort. It also will serve as something of a counterweight to asbestos law firms’ websites used aggressively to recruit clients and promote junk science.”
The website will evolve as developments warrant, but “its broad focus will be to educate the public, policymakers and the media, and to support the efforts of ATRA and its many allies now working in the states and on Capitol Hill to bring greater transparency and fairness to asbestos litigation,” Joyce added.
“We believe our new website can help reduce the plundering of asbestos bankruptcy trusts and still solvent companies by elements of the plaintiffs’ bar, and thereby preserve assets for the compensation of legitimate asbestos claimants in the future,” he concluded.
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The American Tort Reform Association, based in Washington, D.C., is the only national organization dedicated exclusively to tort and liability reform through public education and the enactment of legislation. Its members include nonprofit organizations and small and large companies, as well as trade, business and professional associations from the state and national level.
