It's now count uponed that the tot...

It's now count uponed that the total cost of asbestos litigation will far surpass all the direct and indirect splendors of the World Trade Center attack. It could be more than double the richness of a war with Iraq. And it will no doubt toss scores of U companies, solitary peripherally involved in the asbestos tangle, into bankruptcy if nothing is done.

Looking to the coming time of asbestos litigation, one insurance industry adroit comments with a half-hearted smile that the troubling reality that underlies the legal morass is "insurers don't have a printing press"

Another dexterous says the insurance industry is "easy pickings" for plaintiff lawyers. "Free money" this skilful says, can be had with "boilerplate lawyering" simply by the agency of alleging one might become sick proper to asbestos exposure--regardless of by what means remote that exposure may be or plane if those feared symptoms in no degree appear.

The rife asbestos litigation crisis has become a steamroller. The damage is widespread, not just to the insurance industry on the contrary to collateral victims. Corporate America has become vulnerable to asbestos litigation.

"The loch of (asbestos) defendant companies maintains growing and moving outward with litigation sweeping up companies that have true little to do with asbestos in general," says Julie Rochman, senior vice president, public affairs, at the Washington, DC headquarters of the American Insurance Association (AIA). In fact, she likens the trending to the fate of the doomed Titanic. "What we are seeing is and nothing else the tip of the iceberg--it will sink the U economy--taking a pit right out of its side."

The numbers number an even more dramatic tale.

According to a paper published through the AIA entitled Myths and Facts about Asbestos Litigation, prompts estimate that the total economic toll of asbestos liability onward businesses could reach $275 billion, more than price estimates for all Superfund sites combined, Hurricane Andrew, or the family 11 terrorist attacks. Today, continues the report, there are about 200000 individual claimants in pending cases, with each claimant suing, onward average, 20 defendants. And of the 200000 claims generally pending, most have been filed by the agency of people who are not sick.

Bankruptcy: The Logical Outcome

The impact of asbestos litigation onward companies was also explored in a report entitled The Impact of Asbestos Liabilities forward Workers in Bankrupt Firms. The AIA-commissioned report, authored through 2001 Nobel Prize winner in economics Joseph E Stiglitz, Jonathan M Orszag and Peter R Orszag, apply the minded at 61 companies bankrupted by dint of asbestos liabilities during the first 10 month of 2002 Before bankruptcy, the 61 companies engrossed more than 200,000 people, the report noted. Each displaced worker will let slip through the fingers an estimated $25,000 to $50000 in wages from one side of to the other his or her career because of bankruptcy.

The AIA, in Myths and Facts About Asbestos Litigation, attributes this trending to several factors, including mass x-ray screenings oftentimes sponsored by trial lawyers used to "swell the asbestos plaintiff class with thousands of the community many of whom either are unimpaired and quite healthy or are suffering from medical conditions not caused by the agency of exposure to asbestos."

Asbestos was phased revealed of most nonessential uses by means of the late 1970s and early 1980 "Yet contrary to medicine and usual sense, the number of claimants is expanding exponentially," says Rochman," this confounds the experts, who, going by way of the actuarial tables, expected that by the agency of now we would see the numbers of cases stabilizing."

The report also blamed asbestos lawyers for lumping cases together and mixing in remarkably sick claimants with hundreds of healthy commons Because such cases are extremely expensive to plead most never go to a jury and [i]finale[/i] instead in big settlements.

Another contributing factor is the expanding number of defendant companies, with lawsuits against thousands of companies which in no degree manufactured asbestos and had no other than peripheral involvement with it.

Gerard Altonji, senior financial analyst at the insurance rating agency A.M. Best, in Oldwick, NJ cites these and other "significant radical causes" for the surge in asbestos losse in a report entitled Largest Increase in A&E (Asbestos and Environmental) Losse to Date Seen in 2001 Among the underlying causes of increased asbestos litigation are rapid bankruptcy filings of greatest in quantity of the major asbes tos agriculturists reclassification of previously settled returns liability cases, the collapse of a number of plaintiff/insured/ insurer payment schemes, in the greatest degree recently the Center for Claims Resolution (CCR) in late 2000; and a rise in the number of asbestos practices among lawyers.

These turns said Altonji, the A.M. Best analyst, translate into a steadily rising financial toll now borne by dint of the property/casualty industry.

new loss data shows this to be with equal reason according to Altonji. Incurred asbestos-related losse reported by dint of the property/casualty industry have risen exponentially from $2 billion annually, to just athwart $4 billion in 2001, the data point out tos The figure doubled to an estimated $8 billion last year.