Bringing a suit against Johnson & Johnson in its own backyard is challenging, but not in the way one might think, said Moshe Maimon.

A partner at Levy Konigsberg, Maimon  is part of the team that won $117 million in damages this week in New Jersey state court on behalf of a longtime user of Johnson's Baby Powder who developed mesothelioma.

It's the first time J&J was held liable for causing the deadly disorder. More cases are in the pipeline, along with thousands of others alleging that talcum powder causes ovarian cancer.

For the win, Maimon  and co-counsel Joseph Satterley  and Denyse Clancy of Kazan, McClain, Satterley & Greenwood earn the title of litigators of the week. Robert Lytle of Szaferman, Lakind, Blumstein & Blader in Lawrenceville, New Jersey was local counsel.

Delivering his opening statement in January in the Middlesex County Courthouse, a five-minute walk from J&J headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Maimon took pains to clarify that the suit wasn't “about the many fine people that work at J&J. It's about the actions and decisions of a small group of people at J&J and what they did.”

In an interview on Thursday, Maimon, who is based in New York, said he wasn't concerned that bringing a case against a major local employer and civic benefactor would backfire with area residents. He was simply afraid that the company's reputation was so strong that local residents serving on the jury would not believe J&J covered up the presence of asbestos in its products.

“A lot of people, when they hear [testimony about asbestos in talc products], their initial reaction is, how could that be? They have a hard time believing it. J&J is such a skillful marketer—through their advertising, they reinforce the purity of their product,” Maimon said.

However, he added, “I can imagine, as for J&J, it's hard as a psychological thing to lose a case in your own home court.”

Maimon, Satterley and Clancy represented Stephen Lanzo III, 46, who used generous amounts of the company's talc products for more than 30 years. Married and the father of three children, Lanzo was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2016.

On April 5, a jury in the Superior Court of New Jersey, Middlesex County, awarded $37 million compensatory damages.  On April 11, the same jury awarded another $80 million in punitive damages.

Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay $80.9 million and Imerys Talc America, which supplied the asbestos to J&J, was ordered to pay $36.1 million. Both defendants say they will appeal.

Jurors found the plaintiffs' testimony from scientific experts palatable because it was “directly in line with the internal documents and internal admissions that both Johnson & Johnson and Imerys were making internally,” Maimon said.

“Over the last half-century, the documents that have been in J&J files and in the files of its suppliers have told a very different story than what regulators and scientists and the public have been told by spokespeople from the company,” he said.

But the first time a plaintiff claimed J&J talc products caused mesothelioma, the company came out on top.

In November 2017, a California jury rejected claims that J&J negligently manufactured or designed its baby powder and Shower to Shower products or failed to warn that its talcum powder products caused mesothelioma. The plaintiff in that case was represented by Dallas-based Simon Greenstone Panatier.  

Maimon, however, came into Lanzo's case already familiar with the issues. In 2006, he won $3.5 million in what he says was the first case in the nation linking talc to mesothelioma. He represented the widow of Peter Hirsch, a pottery artisan and ceramics studio owner who allegedly used talc as an ingredient in a glaze for pots. Maimon said the case helped him understand the relationship between talc and asbestos as well as the one between talc producers and regulators.

Throughout the trial in New Jersey before Superior Court Judge Ana Viscomi, lawyers for Johnson & Johnson from Kirkland & Ellis and Drinker Biddle & Reath maintained that the company's products were safe, and that lawyers for the plaintiff were mischaracterizing the evidence.  They also maintained that the company's talc products have never contained asbestos.

But Maimon said at opening arguments that a talc mine in Vermont—a longtime source of the company's baby powder—was known since the early 1970s to contain asbestos.

A J&J lawyer at closing countered that legitimate tests have never shown measurable amounts of asbestos in the company's talc, and that Lanzo's mesothelioma came from other types of exposure.

But in the end, jurors found the plaintiff's evidence more compelling.