Dean Omar Branham Shirley, LLP

On October 6, 2025, a Los Angeles County jury ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $966 million to the family of Mae K. Moore, a mother of three who died of mesothelioma in December 2021 at age 88 after decades of using the company's talc-based Baby Powder and Shower to Shower. The award comprised $16 million in compensatory damages and $950 million in punitive damages, reported at the time as the largest talc-mesothelioma verdict ever returned against Johnson & Johnson. The honest frame: on March 13, 2026, the trial judge, Ruth Ann Kwan, vacated the entire $950 million punitive award, finding the malice showing insufficient, while leaving the $16 million compensatory judgment intact. Both sides have said they will appeal. Dean Omar Branham Shirley tried the case for the Moore family, and this page documents it as part of the public record.

In July 2023, after a two-phase trial before Judge Cary Nishimoto in Los Angeles County Superior Court, a jury awarded roughly $107 million, $32 million compensatory and $75 million punitive, to the family of Joel Hernandezcueva, a janitor who died of pleural mesothelioma in 2014 in his mid-40s after asbestos exposure at the Park Place complex in Irvine. The jury found raw-asbestos supplier Union Carbide acted with malice and assigned it the largest share of fault. The honest frame: on December 12, 2023, Judge Nishimoto set the verdict aside in its entirety, granting judgment notwithstanding the verdict and a new trial on findings of juror misconduct, misconduct by plaintiffs' counsel, insufficient evidence, and excessive damages. Plaintiffs' counsel said they would appeal, and no published decision reinstating the verdict appears in the public record as of this writing. Dean Omar Branham Shirley tried the 2023 case, and this page documents it as part of the public record.

A Portland jury awarded $34.2 million to Richard Long, a former Swan Island shipyard laborer diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma, after hearing that John Crane Inc. knew its asbestos gaskets and packing were dangerous decades before it warned anyone who worked with them.

Brennen Atkeson was exposed to asbestos as a child, second-hand, from dust carried into the family home on the work clothes of his stepfather, an oilfield worker. The fibers came from raw asbestos put into drilling-mud products and from drilling-rig products. He developed mesothelioma and died at 38.

William Berry worked at the West Monroe Paper Mill from 1961 to 2010. Foster Wheeler installed the mill's two five-story boilers in the mid-1960s, sheathed in asbestos, and came back every year to strip and reinstall that asbestos in what he described as a dust storm. He wore his work clothes home; his wife Lynda washed them daily for decades. In 2015, at 65, she was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma. An Ouachita Parish jury awarded medical expenses but nothing for her suffering; the judge added $3,000,000 in general damages on JNOV. The judgment against Foster Wheeler, one-half virile share of $4,500,000, was $2,250,000, affirmed in 2019.