Asbestos chrysotile fibers that cause lung disease, COPD, lung cancer, mesothelioma. Photo Credit: shutterstock

Asbestos filings fell in 2017, and it didn't matter whether they were brought over mesothelioma, lung cancer or other forms of cancer, according to consulting firm KCIC.

The report, released this month, found that there were 4,450 asbestos filings last year, compared to 4,812 in 2016 and 5,336 in 2015, the first year that KCIC began compiling such data. For the first time, the decrease hit all types of cases. Mesothelioma cases were down 5 percent, lung cancer about 10 percent and other types of cancers nearly 12 percent.

KCIC, which consults defendant companies about products liability matters, including asbestos, gave no specific reasons for the decrease. But plaintiffs attorney Perry Weitz, co-founder of New York's Weitz & Luxenberg, who spoke about the report's findings at a conference this month, had a simple explanation: The number of victims was dwindling as fewer people work around asbestos.

“There's only a finite number of mesothelioma cases, and that number's going to go down every year anyway,” he said. And lung cancer cases, which have been harder for plaintiffs to blame on asbestos, are limited in number. “You'll see a certain leveling out. There's not going to be a dramatic decrease, and not a dramatic increase.”

The report found that the same top 10 plaintiffs' firms filed 62 percent of all asbestos cases. Those firms filed suits in predominantly the same venues against the same defendants for the most part, though the report speculated that the U.S. Supreme Court's June 19, 2017, decision in Bristol-Myers Squibb v. Superior Court of California could bring changes.

Topping the list of plaintiffs firms was Gori Julian & Associates, based in Edwardsville, Illinois, which filed 588 asbestos cases last year, up 8.1 percent from 2016. Three other firms increased their filings, including Weitz & Luxenberg, which filed 449 cases last year, but the rest of them reduced their output. The largest decreases came from Goldberg, Persky & White in Pittsburgh, which dropped 26.9 percent to 147 cases; Simmons Hanly Conroy, based in Alton, Illinois, which fell 25 percent to 379 filings; and New York's Napoli Shkolnik, which fell 34.1 percent to 85.

Shkolnik's Paul Napoli attributed his own firm's numbers to a singular focus on existing, rather than new, cases in 2017. But the general downward trend wasn't unexpected.

“Some of the major defendants have gone bankrupt in the last couple of years,” he said, noting the Chapter 11 filings of Kaiser Gypsum in 2016 and Georgia-Pacific in 2017. “These are big defendants that caused a lot of injury, so most of those claims have shifted to bankruptcy.”

The filings also remained concentrated in the same jurisdictions, although several had significant decreases. Madison County, Illinois, for instance, which has long held the No. 1 venue for asbestos filings, saw a 13 percent drop in 2017, while St. Clair County, Illinois, jumped 200 percent.

Napoli attributed that shift to recent defense verdicts that have come out of Madison County.

“It was no longer a haven for the plaintiffs to use against the defendants,” he said. “The defendants shot themselves in the foot by allowing plaintiffs to disperse the cases across the country, which makes it more expensive of them.”

Other top venues were New York, Philadelphia and New Castle County, Delaware. In particular, mesothelioma cases jumped 32 percent in Philadelphia, 25.5 percent in Middlesex, New Jersey, more than 21 percent in Alameda, California, and 5 percent in New Castle. They fell nearly 17 percent in New York and 16 percent in Los Angeles.

The report said recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, like Bristol-Myers, could begin to impact where plaintiffs firms file their cases, with New York and Delaware potentially more favorable options given that more defendant companies have headquarters there. The report also noted that more plaintiffs firms, like Simmons Hanly Conroy, were filing cases outside of Illinois.

It also assessed the potential impact of legislation that required plaintiffs attorneys to disclose in court all claims that their clients made against bankruptcy trusts. The U.S. House of Representatives passed such legislation last year, but 13 states also have passed similar laws. In Ohio, the state with the most asbestos cases, filings have decreased at a greater pace since passing reform legislation in 2013, the report said.

Weitz said neither Bristol-Myers nor legislation over bankruptcy trusts had impacted asbestos filings.

“It has to do with the age of the litigation and the types of disease,” he said.

There are 3,000 mesothelioma cases across the nation, he said. “And that number goes down a little bit every year. And in the lung cancer cases, although there are more of them, plaintiff lawyers aren't in the habit of filing cases that aren't good cases that they won't be successful with.”