I am very pleased to announce a new addition to the resources available on www.WorldAsbestosReport.org. We have just posted a new monograph titled "Killing the Future: Asbestos Use in Asia," written by Laurie Kazan-Allen and published by an international consortium of unions, victims’ groups, occupational health and safety organizations, and university groups under the overall coordination of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat. Published last month, this monograph reviews the experiences of China, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Korea, and Japan in dealing with the problems of asbestos contamination. It documents the West’s dumping of contaminated ocean-going vessels into the ship-breaking industries of India and Bangladesh, and addresses the impact of natural disasters on the scope of asbestos contamination.

This work builds on the work begun at the 2004 Global Asbestos Conference in Tokyo and subsequent meetings in Asia. Copies are being provided to key members of both the House and Senate leadership to help them better understand the magnitude of the asbestos problem in the hope that such knowledge will improve the chances for S.742, the current version of Senator Patty Murray’s oft-proposed and until now ignored bill to finally ban asbestos in the United States. We hope to continue adding newly published materials to the www.WorldAsbestosReport.org web site as they become available, and also to begin to accumulate and post relevant materials from past seminars and research projects in order to make that as comprehensive a resource as possible.

Our firm, through The Kazan, McClain, Abrams, Fernandez, Lyons, Greenwood, Oberman, Satterley & Bosl Foundation, Inc, is proud that our support of IBAS over the years has helped make it possible for them to publish works of this quality. As always, your comments are welcome.

To download a .pdf of the full report, click here.

I wrote before that one of our areas of interest is the international effort to ban the use of asbestos. It is ironic that much of the rest of the world is far ahead of the United States in this effort. My partners and I, through The Kazan, McClain, Abrams, Fernandez, Lyons, Greenwood, Oberman, Satterley & Bosl Foundation, Inc, have been major supporters of the organized global efforts to ban asbestos. Over the years, I think it fair to say that we have been the single largest financial supporter of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat, whose mission is stated in its very title. IBAS has helped organize and coordinate many meetings around the world devoted to asbestos awareness, education, and efforts to outlaw future use of asbestos. We came to realize that much of these materials produced at these international meetings was disappearing. Often, the meetings are small and not terribly well funded, and whatever informational materials they produced were not widely distributed beyond actual attendees. Nor were they generally available online.

I am very pleased to announce that we have found a way to solve that problem. We are sponsoring a new web site, now up and running, called www.WorldAsbestosReport.org. It is just that – a place we are making available for anyone hosting or organizing meetings related to asbestos use, asbestos disease, and efforts to solve the problems of such use, so that they can post calendar information about these meetings to a worldwide audience, and then post the actual program materials for all to see. We are inaugurating this web site with two landmark contributions.

IBAS and others organized the Global Asbestos Conference as an ongoing institution. The first conference was held in Brazil in 2000 and the second was held in Tokyo in 2004. The proceedings of both conferences were prepared and published on CD-ROM. These materials include not only the traditional forms of medical and scientific papers, but photographs, video clips, multimedia presentations, and a whole host of fascinating information. My firm contributed the funds needed to produce and distribute these annals on CD, and we have now posted them in their entirety on www.WorldAsbestosReport.org with most portions available in both .html and .pdf formats, and all fully searchable. Please drop by and visit it and let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

-Steven Kazan.

The Boston Herald published an article the other day about a local asbestos case involving a woman who died tragically of mesothelioma some years ago. The paper went on to quote some experts from around the country, and two of the comments struck me as particularly relevant. One person noted that mesothelioma is "a disease that has been ignored for decades." I found that a bit curious because at least at my office, mesothelioma has been our primary focus for over 30 years. It is true that much remains to be done, but it’s also true that the people who did the most to ignore asbestos disease and mesothelioma are the leaders of American industry who have known since the 1930s that asbestos was causing cancer, who were seeing cases of mesothelioma by the 1940s and 1950s, and who knew by 1960 without question that mesothelioma was a signal disease of asbestos exposure. The Herald went on to say that "in the past year, attorney competition for patients suffering from mesothelioma has heated up . . . ."

There is no doubt that lawyers are competing for new business, but this is not an asbestos phenomenon. Lawyers in all fields compete for new clients just as all businesses seek new customers. If you want to see enough lawyer ads to last a lifetime, just type mesothelioma into your favorite search engine and see what happens, or turn on cable TV late at night, or pick up any magazine devoted to veterans or other heavily exposed groups. But relying on these advertising efforts to select an attorney is a big mistake. There are reasonable ways to make such selection and appropriate questions to ask. There are lawyer web sites that read like the National Enquirer or other tabloids; there are lawyer web sites masquerading as non-profit informational public service resources; there are lawyer web sites that trace readers and make unsolicited "cold calls" to people who visit their sites, trying to sign them up as clients. I think that’s a shame, and I don’t do it.

I started our web site in 1998 because I lost a client to just such efforts. A gentleman who lived about 80 miles away from our office was given my name by his neighbor, whose case I had handled. Just as we were getting started, his daughter went online and found a lawyer on the East Coast who had a large web presence. That lawyer signed them up and then transferred the case to another lawyer in California, who seemed to lose interest after the gentleman passed away. Thereafter, the family came back to me, rather sheepishly, and asked if I would please take over the case. I did, but it taught me a great lesson. I learned that there were people out there who thought that a web site was more "real" than an office a short drive away with 100 people working very hard in 27,000 square feet of a real office building. I rapidly concluded that if there were people who thought that a web site was more real than an office building, I had better build a web site. So we did.

But I think what we do is too important and our clients’ problems are too serious to trivialize them, or publicize their personal business. So, we decided that our web site would serve primarily as an information resource for people, helping them to understand what asbestos is, what asbestos does, and what can be done to manage both medical and legal consequences. It seems like we got it right – The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, published a survey article about asbestos information resources and recognized our web site as one of the best out there. We have won other awards and recognition, but nothing is as satisfying as a family member contacting us to thank us for providing all the information they needed to understand what had happened to a loved one, even when they don’t ask for our assistance.

Steven Kazan.

Today is an exciting day for us as we introduce the second major revision of our firm’s web site, www.kazanlaw.com, which premiered in 1998. As part of Kazanlaw 3.0, we’re introducing not only this blog but also an RSS feed, with video clips to follow shortly. I have been a lawyer more than 40 years and have focused my time and energy on representing asbestos victims since 1974. Back then, when I wanted to write to more than one person, we used carbon paper; now I can write to thousands with a couple of keystrokes. I can only hope that people consider that to be a good thing.

I’d like to think I know a good deal about the world of asbestos and hope to use this blog – or am I required to refer to it as a blawg? – to comment on it in all its aspects. Asbestos is a national problem, but also one that is increasingly global in its dimensions. As a lawyer, I of course focus on legal aspects. However, a great deal of my time is spent keeping up with medical developments so our firm can better understand what’s happening to our clients and what their treatment options might be. In addition to developments in treatment, we pay careful attention to developments related to the basic science questions underlying asbestos and how it causes disease. The Kazan, McClain, Abrams, Fernandez, Lyons, Greenwood, Oberman, Satterley & Bosl Foundation, Inc, supports significant medical research in both these areas and will continue to do so.

Anything involving law, especially at the intersection with science, often becomes political, and as a result, I spend a lot of time dealing with the political aspects of asbestos. I have submitted written testimony and testified at hearings of both the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee and have frequently been involved in lobbying efforts on the national level. I am also actively involved as counsel to members of asbestos creditor committees in almost every pending asbestos bankruptcy and serve as a member of the Trustee Advisory Committee to almost every operating asbestos trust that exists to pay compensation to asbestos victims. Our firm represents people from all over the United States and also has clients from foreign countries. I was a member of asbestos victims’ creditors’ committees on two British asbestos bankruptcies, and we are heavily involved in both international and domestic efforts to ban future use of asbestos.

All of these areas are potential sources of inspiration for future postings here. From time to time, comments and observations may be posted by my partners or other people at our firm or perhaps by the Kazan Foundation. Other comments may come from our colleagues who are actively involved in worker health and safety efforts in California and across the country, as reflected by our efforts with WorkSafe!, a non-profit, non-governmental organization located in our building and focused on worker health and safety issues in California.

This is a much more informal venue than our main web site, and we welcome comments, suggestions, and questions. We will do our best to stay current and be responsive. Please come back and see us again soon.

-Steven Kazan.