This is an appeal of the first asbestos personal injury claim in Michigan to go to verdict in more than ten years, involving alleged due process violations and gamesmanship in Michigan asbestos litigation. The trial court bundled different asbestos cases together in violation of an administrative order from the Michigan Supreme Court, and selected a non-malignant case from a trial group of 95 cases to hastily proceed to trial without an opportunity for meaningful discovery.
The defendant opted not to settle, in part, because it had strong reasons to believe that the diagnosis of plaintiff’s asbestos expert, Dr. Jeffrey Parker, was unreliable; a fact confirmed by a blind study of independent medical examiners. Also, the plaintiff did not specifically allege exposure to the defendant’s asbestos products and never maintained, until the eve of trial, that asbestos-related injuries forced him to retire early. The trial court rejected these challenges and proceeded to trial, giving the defendant only six days to prepare a case involving 95 possible cases and over 30,000 pages of information. The case resulted in a verdict for the plaintiff totaling nearly a half-million dollars.
The NAM filed an amicus brief on 12/29/10 supporting the appeal, arguing that the trial court routinely appeared to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Michigan Supreme Court's asbestos anti-bundling order, which was designed to restore fairness and rationality to that state's asbestos litigation. In this case, the trial court allowed bundling of cases with highly suspect and dissimilar injuries into larger trial groups, and forced the defendant to enter the trial effectively blindfolded, without vital, case-dispositive information needed for its defense. Because Dr. Parker's testimony was not excluded, such unreliable screening testimony encourages false claims, harms manufacturers who create jobs, and threatens payments to palintiffs with reliable claims.
The case was settled without a ruling from the court.