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#3 South Carolina Asbestos

There is no place in America where defendants experience a litigation environment that is as unbalanced as the South Carolina asbestos court. Sources say South Carolina had a 300% increase in asbestos case filings from 2024 to 2025—the largest percentage increase in the nation, by far. Not only are South Carolina defendants feeling the pain, but the state court is now exporting its Judicial Hellholes® practices abroad by improperly appointing receivers over foreign entities, extending its overreach beyond U.S. borders.

All asbestos litigation in South Carolina is assigned to former South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal. She was appointed by the state’s high court as presiding asbestos judge in 2017. South Carolina’s asbestos litigation first landed on the Judicial Hellholes® list in 2020, following years of stability. Over the years, Judge Toal’s rulings have become increasingly extreme.

As discussed in past reports, at the prompting of plaintiffs’ attorneys, the court has developed a reputation for sanctioning defendants, typically for purported discovery violations, and for imposing punishments that appear disproportionate to the alleged conduct at issue. For example, the court has stripped away defenses, such as by instructing a jury to presume that a company exposed the plaintiff to asbestos after decades-old records were destroyed in a fire.

South Carolina’s asbestos judge has demonstrated a clear bias against corporate defendants, reflected in rulings that lead to unfair trials and excessive verdicts and the frequent appointment of receivers to maximize recoveries from insurers.

The South Carolina Asbestos Court’s Corporate Takeovers

In recent months, attention has focused on the asbestos court’s extraordinary practice of placing companies in receiverships under the control of an influential personal injury attorney. At first, the court used receiverships over defunct companies to go after their former insurers for money from decades-old policies that may cover asbestos claims. Some have called this the court’s “zombie” litigation. Then, the court stretched this approach to include appointing a receiver for solvent, functioning out-of-state and foreign corporations. By making these appointments, the court empowers the receiver to accept service of process for the business, sue insurers and others, or take other actions purportedly on the company’s behalf.

The receiver collects settlements and uses that money for anything related to asbestos litigation, including fees for other plaintiffs’ lawyers. There is no public accounting of where the collected money goes.

By one count, Judge Toal has appointed the same local personal injury lawyer as a receiver at least 24 times over the past seven years. Perhaps “receiver” is an apt title, as he reportedly receives more than 30% of whatever he recovers under this arrangement.

Courts occasionally appoint receivers to protect assets that are in danger of being dissipated before a judgment can be paid. But the South Carolina asbestos court’s approach is a radical misuse of the tool.

Law professor Lester Brickman, who has written extensively on the asbestos litigation, has said, “I am not aware of this procedure having been adopted in any other jurisdiction.” Even lawyers representing plaintiffs in South Carolina’s asbestos litigation acknowledge that appointing a receiver for a viable company is “unusual.”

International Rejection of Receivership Orders

Courts outside of South Carolina have recoiled from the receiver’s expansive assertions of power.

For example, Judge Toal appointed a receiver over a Quebec mining company, Asbestos Corporation Limited (ACL), empowering the receiver to “assume control of the defense of asbestos claims made against ACL in the United States,” including accepting service and hiring counsel on behalf of ACL. The order authorized the receiver to obtain ACL’s financial records, investigate and administer ACL’s insurance assets, and bring claims on behalf of ACL against insurance carriers or other entities. As a result, both the receiver and ACL’s management claimed to speak for the company in its dealings with insurers, leading to confusion, including sanctions on insurers and contractual disputes between the company and its insurers over the insurers’ authority to settle asbestos claims. The receiver’s actions, according to ACL, “increased liability and damages for ACL, rather than protecting ACL’s interests and those of its stakeholders” and “exacerbated” its risk of default judgments. ACL subsequently filed for bankruptcy protection. Months later, in July 2025, a Canadian court found the South Carolina asbestos court’s receivership order “astonishing in the eyes of a court rooted in Canadian . . . judicial culture” and found that it had “seriously compromised” ACL’s “defense of the lawsuits” filed against it in the United States. Most recently, a bankruptcy court in New York observed in October 2025 that, because of the receiver’s actions, ACL’s efforts to settle asbestos claims had stalled and the company faced mounting default judgments as it found itself “torn between two masters.”

Similarly, the asbestos court appointed a receiver over an English corporation, Cape Intermediate Holdings Ltd. In response, the High Court of Justice Business and Property Courts of England and Wales entered an injunction prohibiting the receiver from acting or purporting to act for the company. The English court observed that the receiver went to “excessive lengths” to pursue “what he conceives to be his rights and duties” and “does not regard his powers as being confined to South Carolina.” The English court found it “quite clear” that a court in South Carolina cannot appoint a receiver over a foreign business that has no presence in South Carolina or anywhere in the United States. The English court noted that the receiver purports to make admissions on behalf of the company that are “positively damaging to the legitimate interests of the company over whose assets he has been appointed, despite the fact that one of his obligations is to act in its proper interests.” The court also found that allowing a South Carolina court to act in this manner could have serious consequences for a company, including impacting its finances, interfering with its operations, damaging its reputation, and leading to more lawsuits against the company in South Carolina and worldwide. In fact, the English court ruled that by “purporting to act as an agent of [Cape] without authority recognized in English law” the receiver acted tortiously. The receiver was subsequently ordered by the U.K. court in April 2025 to pay £1 million (about $1.3 million) to reimburse Cape for costs incurred responding to the receiver’s attempts to act in the company’s name.

Third Circuit Rejects Receiver’s Attempt to Displace Company Management

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recently greeted the receiver’s extraordinary powers with similar skepticism. In September 2025, the court rejected the receiver’s assertion that the board of directors of former New Jersey talc supplier Whittaker, Clark & Daniels could not file for bankruptcy without the receiver’s approval. In that instance, the South Carolina asbestos court placed the company in a receivership following a $29 million judgment against it. After the verdict and appointment of the receiver, Whittaker filed for bankruptcy.

The Third Circuit recognized that while courts can appoint receivers for insolvent corporations, “that authority is not without limits.” Interpreting the receivership order to block a company’s board from filing for bankruptcy would “be an unprecedented exertion of power” over a business whose internal affairs are governed by another state and constitute “a radical intrusion” into that state’s sovereignty, the Third Circuit ruled.

South Carolina Supreme Court

The South Carolina Supreme Court has not proven to be a sufficient check on the state’s asbestos court. The state supreme court has recognized that receiverships are supposed to be reserved for “the rarest of cases,” when “there is the strongest reason to believe that the plaintiff is entitled to the relief demanded in his complaint, and there is danger that the property will be materially injured before the case can be deter-mined.” Yet, in May 2025, the state’s high court affirmed the asbestos court’s appointment of a receiver over defendant Atlas Turner, even before a judgment against the company, as a sanction for a discovery violation.

The South Carolina Supreme Court found that the receivership order went too far in empowering the receiver to not only go after Atlas Turner’s insurance assets to compensate the plaintiff, but also to allow the receiver to pursue “any other assets” that could potentially “touch” anyone who might have a claim against the company. The state high court cautioned that a receivership order does not grant the receiver entry into the company’s boardroom “or some vague right to ‘take over’ operations of the company.” As a positive step, in June, the South Carolina Supreme Court directed the asbestos court to ensure that each of its receiver-ship orders is justified, rule on pending motions to dissolve or clarify receiverships, and submit monthly reports to the high court on its use of receiverships. Thus far, however, those reports do not indicate any course correction.

Will the U.S. Supreme Court Step In?

The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a petition for certiorari in the Atlas Turner case. Filed in August 2025, Atlas Turner argues that a state court violates the due process rights of defendants, intrudes on the sovereignty of other nations, and becomes entangled in foreign affairs when it purports to empower a receiver to exert authority over property beyond its territorial limits. ATRA filed an amicus brief in the case arguing that the receiver’s expansive assertions of power have caused strife for businesses and led to rebukes from courts in the United States and abroad.

Prejudicial Practices

Defendants face prejudicial practices, such as combining unrelated and drastically different cases into a single trial. For example, in one case the court planned to try the wrongful death case of a 70-year-old man who was occupationally exposed to asbestos and died from pleural (lung) mesothelioma alongside the personal injury case of a 20-year-old living woman who was diagnosed with peritoneal (abdominal) mesothelioma, which often is genetic. Consolidating cases for trial in this manner has been shown to significantly increase both a plaintiff’s chances of winning at trial and the size of any award as compared to trying the cases separately.

A Relaxed Causation Standard, While Defendants Cannot Show Alternative Causes

The South Carolina asbestos court, with the blessing of the state supreme court, also helps plaintiffs by applying a relaxed causation standard. Plaintiffs’ experts in South Carolina are permitted to testify that every exposure to asbestos contributes to the development of asbestos-related disease. The cumulative dose theory is an outgrowth of the discredited “each and every exposure” theory, which espouses the view that “every exposure to asbestos above a threshold level is necessarily a substantial factor in the contraction of asbestos-related diseases.”

Courts in other states have rejected the “cumulative dose” and “any exposure” theories because they ignore that “[d]ose is the single most important factor to consider in evaluating whether an alleged expo-sure caused a specific adverse effect.” As the American Tort Reform Association explained in an amicus brief filed in the South Carolina Supreme Court:

[T]he widely-rejected every exposure approach [and] cumulative exposure testimony pro-pounded by Plaintiff ’s experts…are identical in foundation and application—neither one excludes minor workplace or bystander exposures. By lumping various exposures, regardless of substantiality, under the heading of “cumulative,” plaintiff ’s experts attempt to transform even the most limited exposure into a legally “substantial” one.

Given that the deck seems stacked against defendants, going to trial in a South Carolina asbestos case presents a significant risk of a nuclear verdict®. In August 2024, for example, a jury awarded $63.4 million, including $32.6 million in compensatory damages and $30.8 million in punitive damages, to a man who claimed asbestos in baby powder caused his mesothelioma (despite years of working with asbestos-containing brake pads in his father’s garage). There have been other massive awards in South Carolina asbestos cases including a $32 million verdict in 2021 and a $29 million verdict in 2023.

Meanwhile, defendants face obstacles when they attempt to show that something other than their product is the reason the plaintiff developed a medical condition. For example, Judge Toal has “repeatedly ruled that plaintiff experts can tell jurors talc was the only possible cause of a person’s mesothelioma, while preventing defense experts from even mentioning other possible causes,” such as exposure to asbestos from other sources.

A Court That Increases Jury Verdicts

The asbestos court has increased jury awards that the court viewed as too low for plaintiffs. For instance, the court increased a jury’s award to a plaintiff from $200,000 to $1.58 million and an award to the plaintiff’s spouse from $100,000 to $290,000 — a decision the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld as within the judge’s discretion. After another trial, the asbestos court increased a plaintiff’s award from $600,000 to $1 million.

Even When Defendants Win, They Lose

Defense verdicts are short-lived in the South Carolina asbestos court. In one instance in which a jury was apparently not persuaded that an insulation supplier’s product was present at the plaintiff’s worksite — even after the court issued an adverse jury instruction — the court found the verdict unsupported by the evidence and ordered a new trial. In another case, after a boilermaker received a defense verdict, the court sanctioned the defendant $300,000, requiring it to pay the plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees and costs for producing documents, mid-trial, to rebut a new theory sprung during the plaintiff’s questioning of a third-party witness.

Another example occurred in October 2024 when the court granted a new trial — one year after a defense verdict— based on alleged “newly discovered evidence” about a talc supplier’s distribution of its products. The defendant appealed in June 2025, arguing that the court lacked personal jurisdiction over the company (which has no operations in the state) and that South Carolina law does not permit ordering a new trial for a deficient discovery response, the evidence at issue was not requested, and there was no evidence of “fraud.”

In October 2025, Johnson & Johnson obtained another defense verdict in a talc trial in the South Carolina asbestos court, despite a series of rulings that prevented the company from presenting critical evidence. In that instance, the jury did not buy the claim that baby powder caused a man to develop peritoneal mesothelioma. Judge Toal reportedly refused to allow a cancer expert to discuss peer-reviewed scientific articles indicating that peritoneal mesothelioma can arise spontaneously and often has no known cause or to allow defense experts to mention the possibility of other sources of the plaintiff’s alleged exposure to asbestos. Nevertheless, after two hours of deliberation, the jury returned a defense verdict on October 2. It remains to be seen whether the verdict survives.

A Fair Shake? Unlikely.

It is rare to see any one of these types of rulings in other jurisdictions. Yet, all of them are seen in South Carolina’s asbestos litigation. Notably, while these types of rulings occur frequently against defendants, ATRA is aware of no similar rulings against plaintiffs.

In fact, attorneys for South Carolina asbestos defendants report an environment like no other. For example, at a hearing in 2024, the court drastically curtailed the scope of defense expert witness opinions and excluded most alternative theories of causation. A defense attorney present at the hearing wrote that the rulings appeared to be driven “not so much by the rules of evidence as by the simple fact that the judge disagreed with the defense experts.” He added, “There were several moments when it looked as if the judge would issue a directed verdict in favor of the plaintiff. Why even go through a show trial?” The attorney concluded with this advice to companies: “Stay away. Get out of cases early, do as little business in the jurisdiction as possible, and drive 500 miles out of the way if need be to avoid being anywhere near the place.”

“Stay away. Get out of cases early, do as little business in the jurisdiction as possible, and drive 500 miles out of the way if need be to avoid being anywhere near the place.”

– Defense attorney Stephen McConnell

End Notes

The spotlight on South Carolina’s asbestos litigation has become brighter due to in depth investigative reporting by a leading South Carolina news source. Fits News recently published a five-part series examining South Carolina’s asbestos litigation machine, receiverships, pursuit of zombie corporations, political influence in the courtroom, and failed efforts to rein it in. The series concludes, “by the time an asbestos case in South Carolina makes it to trial, its outcome has already been determined by forces far outside the jury box” as “an intimate clique of receivers, judges and politically connected lawyers controls every lever of the docket.”