With nine offices located throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Texas and Alabama, our toxic tort trial lawyers have extensive experience with judges and juries throughout the region, while also representing clients in similar matters in other parts of the United States.
Our attorneys defend suits against business and industry clients, including pipeline owners, refineries, chemical manufacturing facilities, pharmaceutical companies, the oil and gas industry, asbestos products manufacturers, the tobacco industry, railroads, and rail and tank car manufacturers and fleet owners. We have considerable knowledge and experience in challenging class certification that we have emphasized in defeating or limiting the scope of toxic tort cases for our clients.
Our understanding of science and medicine, which are key to the defense of these cases, allows us effectively to present our client’s defense. Our attorneys are skilled in dealing with key types of experts, including toxicologists, pulmonologists, air modelers, engineers, chemists, epidemiologists and others, and the medical causation issues typically present in these cases. We have developed a wide network of expert contacts and maintain an extensive reference library of medical and scientific literature. By their very nature, toxic tort cases are fact intensive and fact determinative; to that end, our paralegals and staff have the training and experience to identify and organize quickly key information gathered from the massive amounts of discovery typically produced in toxic tort cases. The use of in-house state-of-the-art computer technology and support personnel allows us efficiently and effectively to manage the large numbers of claimants and voluminous information characteristic of these cases.
Our toxic tort trial lawyers have experience in class actions, mass joinders and individual cases involving pipeline ruptures, facility releases, facility explosions, railcar accidents, various product and component exposures (tobacco, breast implants, asbestos, silica, benzene, lead paint, ethylene oxide, aluminum, herbicides, pesticides, cadmium, creosote, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, ammonia, isocyanates, formaldehyde and others) and off-site migration by water, air or land. Claims have included the following: physical property damage, diminution of property value, and “stigma” damages; actual physical injury and fear of future injury; cancers, including leukemia and other blood diseases; pneumoconiosis (asbestosis, silicosis and aluminum pneumoconiosis), reactive airways dysfunction syndrome and reactive upper airways dysfunction syndrome (RADS and RUDS); auto-immune dysfunction; neural tube defects; nerve damage; cognitive disabilities; and chromosomal damage; minor complaints of temporary headaches, nausea, and various other medical conditions.