I’ve had a brief exposure to asbestos litigation on the defense side. What I saw was pretty amazing.

These mass tort lawyers go to the union halls and sign people up who might have been exposed to asbestos at some point in their past. They get screened by a hand-picked doctor, who invariably finds that the 85-year-old man who smoked 2 packs a day for 60 years and has recently started to develop shortness of breath has an indeterminate smudge on his chest x-ray.

The diagnosis, of course, is asbestosis.

Almost invariably, these plaintiffs can’t provide any evidence that they were exposed to asbestos-containing products at all, let alone which products they were or which companies made them.

It’s a shakedown, pure and simple.