Asbestos Premises Liability Lawsuits

Clarence Borel was the first person to successfully sue the asbestos industry for mesothelioma. His 1973 case, Borel v. Fibreboard, established that manufacturers could be held liable for failing to warn workers about the dangers of their products. It opened the door for every asbestos lawsuit that followed.

When Borel filed his case in 1969, his lawyers sued the companies that made the insulation he worked with. They didn't sue the companies that owned the places where he actually got sick, such as Texaco in Port Arthur, Mobil in Beaumont, and Jefferson Chemical in Port Neches.

Those refineries and chemical plants controlled the jobsites. They decided how the work was done, which materials were allowed, and what safety measures were required. Yet in more than 30 years on the job, Borel testified, no one ever told him the material was dangerous to his health. The respirators he was given were so hard to breathe through that he couldn't do the work in them.

Today, claims against the property owners are a regular part of asbestos litigation. If a refinery, shipyard, or chemical plant knew about asbestos hazards and failed to warn or protect the people working on its property, it can be held liable for the harm that followed.

These are called premises liability claims. They've provided compensation for thousands of workers, contractors, and visitors who were exposed not just to dangerous products, but in dangerous places controlled by companies that knew better.

Read how we'd handle his full case today.

What Is Premises Liability?

Premises liability is simple in concept: property owners have a duty to keep people safe. If they know there's a dangerous condition on their property (like asbestos) and fail to warn people or take reasonable steps to protect them, they can be held liable for the harm that results.

In asbestos cases, these lawsuits typically target refineries, chemical plants, shipyards, power plants, and factories, but can be filed against any company that allowed a person to be exposed to asbestos on its premises. Many companies continued using asbestos long after its dangers were well documented, never warning the workers, contractors, and visitors who passed through their gates.

The key distinction from product liability is who you're suing. Product liability targets the companies that made asbestos products. Premises liability targets the companies that controlled the environment where exposure happened.

Today, asbestos law doesn't just ask who made the product. It asks who let it happen.

What You Have to Prove to Win an Asbestos Premises Liability Lawsuit

To win a premises liability case, you generally have to prove four things: duty, breach, causation, and harm. Here's how they work in asbestos cases.

Duty of Care. If you're invited onto someone's property, whether as a worker, contractor, or visitor, the property owner owes you a duty to keep the space reasonably safe or warn you of hidden dangers. A refinery that brings in outside contractors for a shutdown knows those workers will be handling pipe insulation. If that insulation contains asbestos, management has a duty to tell them and take steps to protect them.

Breach of Duty. The question then becomes whether the property owner met that duty. In asbestos cases, failure usually looks like silence: no warnings posted, no effective respiratory protection, no safety training offered. Workers ripped out pipe coverings without any idea they were releasing deadly fibers into the air, and the danger continued because the people in charge chose not to address it.

Causation. Next, you have to connect the exposure to the illness. Years or decades later, one of those workers develops mesothelioma. Medical experts review his work history and link the disease to time spent at that facility, where asbestos was disturbed and no protections were in place. The experts must conclude that the worker's exposure on that property was a substantial contributing factor in causing his illness. Some states, including Texas, go further and require proof of roughly how much asbestos the worker breathed at each defendant's site. That means reconstructing doses from decades-old work, which is something we do routinely. See how asbestos in the air is measured.

Harm. Finally, you have to show the real-world consequences of that exposure. The worker now faces enormous medical bills. He can no longer work. He suffers physically and emotionally. His family watches him decline. All of it stems from an exposure that could have been prevented.

The key is showing the property owner knew about the danger, failed to act, and that failure led to life-altering consequences.

How We Prove the Owner Knew

Large industrial property owners were not in the dark about asbestos. Big refinery and chemical companies often belonged to the same industrial hygiene and trade groups as the asbestos manufacturers, such as the Industrial Hygiene Foundation, and ran their own health studies of their workers. Some of them knew asbestos was dangerous around the same time the manufacturers did. A refinery with its own medical department is in a very different position from the owner of a small-town hardware store.

To prove what a property owner knew and when, we look at evidence such as:

• The company's own industrial hygiene surveys, air sampling, and medical department records
• Its membership in trade and industrial hygiene associations, and what those groups told their members
• Safety manuals and work specifications showing how the company required asbestos materials to be handled
• OSHA citations and inspection records after 1971
• Claims and testimony from the owner's own employees who worked alongside contractors
• Testimony from coworkers about what they saw, what they were told, and what protection they were given

Defenses Property Owners Raise

Property owners rarely admit responsibility. These are the defenses we see most often.

"We didn't control the work." Many states limit an owner's liability to contractors' workers unless the owner controlled how the work was done. In Texas, a 1996 law known as Chapter 95 requires a contractor's worker to prove the owner both exercised control over the work and actually knew of the danger. That's a high bar, but control is a question of fact, and it varies a great deal from job to job. Compare two contractors at the same refinery:

• A drywaller hired to remodel an office building on the refinery grounds. The refinery probably cared little about how the drywall went up, and its control over that work may have been minimal.
• A boilermaker hired to work on a specialized component in the refinery's power station. That work is mission critical. An error could cause an explosion or a shutdown, so the refinery likely dictated exactly how the work was done, which materials could be used, and had its own inspectors checking the work while it was in progress.

Major refineries kept tight control over contractors working in critical areas, with detailed manuals and specifications for exactly how the work was to be done. Those records can prove the control the law requires.

"We didn't know asbestos was dangerous." Knowledge is tested by what the company knew, or should have known, at the time of the exposure. As explained above, large industrial owners often knew a great deal.

"You were our employee." If the property owner was also your employer, workers' compensation usually bars a lawsuit against it. Owners sometimes argue they were a "statutory employer" or a "borrowed servant" employer of a contractor's worker to get the same protection.

"That company no longer exists." Plants close and companies merge. Liability often passes to a successor company, and old insurance policies may still respond.

Who Can File an Asbestos Premises Liability Lawsuit?

If you were exposed to asbestos on someone else's property and later developed mesothelioma, asbestosis, or lung cancer, you may have the right to file a premises liability lawsuit, even if the exposure happened decades ago.

Contractors and Subcontractors. These are the most common plaintiffs in asbestos premises cases. If you worked at a facility but weren't employed by the property owner, workers' compensation doesn't bar you from suing the owner. Workers' compensation protects employers from lawsuits by their own employees, but it doesn't shield property owners from claims by outside contractors. Whether a claim against the owner succeeds is fact-specific and depends on the state's law and how much control the owner had over your work, but these claims are permitted in many cases.

Vendors, Visitors, and Invitees. The law calls people who are invited onto the property for the owner's benefit "invitees," and they can include delivery drivers, inspectors, sales representatives, maintenance crews, and of course contractors or subcontractors. Property owners owe invitees the highest duty of care, including warning them about known hazards like asbestos.

Licensees. Licensees are people allowed on the property for their own purposes, like social guests, and they are owed a lesser duty than invitees. However, owners must still warn them of known dangers. (Trespassers are owed even less, and because asbestos diseases take decades to appear, asbestos claims by trespassers are vanishingly rare.)

Family Members (Take-Home Exposure). Some states allow family members to sue property owners when asbestos came home on a worker's clothes. Clarence Borel's daughters remember shaking the dust from his work clothes in the garage before washing them. "It was like snow," they recalled. Four of his six children later developed asbestosis from that secondary exposure. Courts are divided on whether property owners owe a duty to workers' families, and many have rejected claims for exposure that happened before the 1972 OSHA asbestos rules required protective clothing and changing rooms. Texas courts have been especially hostile to these claims, so whether a family member can reach the property owner depends heavily on the state and the years of exposure. Take-home claims against the product manufacturers and trusts are often available either way.

Learn More About Secondary Exposure

Surviving Family (Wrongful Death). When someone dies from asbestos exposure that occurred on another's property, surviving spouses and children can file wrongful death claims against the property owner.

Because these rules vary by state, working with attorneys who understand the laws in your jurisdiction is critical.

See how the laws work in your state.

Why These Lawsuits Matter

Premises liability lawsuits do more than compensate victims. They expose patterns of negligence that would otherwise stay buried.

Some companies kept their own employees away from the dirtiest asbestos work and handed it to outside contractors instead, so the people breathing the most dust were the ones the company had the least responsibility for. Because asbestos diseases take decades to appear, no one was likely to connect the illness to the jobsite until long after the work was done.

The biggest property owners understood the danger. They had medical departments, industrial hygienists, and memberships in the same associations that were documenting the link between asbestos and fatal disease. They knew what was in their facilities. They knew workers were breathing it. Too often, they said nothing.

Premises liability lawsuits shine a light on those decisions. They hold property owners accountable for choices they made that caused others to suffer. And they create a record that helps future families prove what happened at the same facilities.

What Compensation Is Available?

Premises liability lawsuits can provide significant compensation for victims of asbestos exposure and their families. The damages cover financial losses, physical suffering, and emotional harm. Clarence Borel's story shows what each type of damages is meant to cover.

Economic Damages cover measurable costs like medical bills, lost wages, and expenses related to treatment. By the time Clarence Borel filed his lawsuit, he had already accumulated thousands of dollars in medical and hospital expenses. His workers' compensation settlement covered only some of that. He was earning $5.45 an hour as a union insulator when his illness forced him to stop working. Economic damages allow a family to recover the wages a worker would have earned had he or she not been exposed to asbestos.

Noneconomic Damages address the human toll of diseases like mesothelioma, including the pain, suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, and loss of consortium they bring. In his final months, Borel couldn't sit up for more than ten minutes. He weighed less than a hundred pounds. He survived on cream of wheat, Jello, and beef bouillon because he couldn't swallow solid food. His wife Thelma gave him morphine shots for the pain. The man who once wanted to field a baseball team with his nineteen grandchildren couldn't walk across the room. (Texas didn't recognize a spouse's loss of consortium claim until 1978, years after Borel's case, so Thelma's loss was addressed through the wrongful death claim after he died.)

Punitive Damages may be awarded when a property owner's conduct was outrageous, like when it deliberately concealed known dangers to save money. Many large property owners knew what was happening inside their facilities and chose silence over safety. Punitive damages exist to punish that kind of decision. Whether they're available, and how much they can be, depends on the state.

Wrongful Death Damages address what the family lost when their loved one passed, such as funeral expenses, lost income, and the profound emotional toll of watching someone you love die from a preventable disease. Thelma Borel spent her husband's final months watching him waste away on their living room couch and had to give him morphine shots for the pain. She also had to serve coffee to the defense attorneys who came to depose him while he was dying. Wrongful death damages place value on those painful moments.

Damages vary by state. Some cap certain categories; others don't. An experienced asbestos attorney can explain what's available in your jurisdiction.

See how the laws work in your state.

How Premises Liability Works with Other Claims

Premises liability is one piece of a larger compensation strategy. Most asbestos victims have multiple types of claims, each targeting a different responsible party.

Premises liability targets the property owners who controlled the environment where exposure happened, such as refineries, shipyards, and chemical plants that failed to warn or protect workers.

Product liability targets companies who made, sold, or installed the asbestos products used on those properties. If the manufacturer is still solvent, you can sue them directly.

Learn about product liability claims.

Trust claims target manufacturers that have filed for bankruptcy. More than 60 asbestos companies have established trusts to compensate victims. Those trusts exist largely because Clarence Borel's case triggered the wave of litigation that eventually forced accountability.

Learn about trust claims.

Workers' compensation may apply if you were employed directly by the property owner. This typically limits your ability to sue them, but it doesn't prevent claims against other parties. And if you were a contractor (like Borel was), workers' compensation doesn't bar you from suing the property owner.

We pursue all available claims simultaneously, coordinating the timing and strategy to maximize total recovery. For a detailed example of how these claims work together, see our page on Clarence Borel: We walk through exactly what would happen if someone with his exposure history contacted us today.

See how all the claims fit together.

Asbestos Premises Liability FAQ

I worked at the plant but wasn't employed by it. Can I sue the owner?

Often, yes. Contractors and subcontractors are the most common plaintiffs in premises cases. Workers' compensation shields your own employer from being sued, but it generally doesn't shield the property owner who controlled the site where you were exposed. Some states, including Texas, require proof that the owner controlled your work and knew of the danger, so the details of your job matter.

What if I was employed directly by the property owner?

Then workers' compensation is usually your remedy against that owner, which typically bars suing them directly. It doesn't stop you from pursuing the makers of the asbestos products you handled or filing trust claims against bankrupt ones, so there's often still a case to build.

I was exposed at a Navy shipyard or other government site. Can I sue the government?

Generally, no. The federal government is protected from most of these claims, and service members can't sue it for injuries tied to their service. But the companies that made the asbestos products used at the site can be sued, bankrupt manufacturers have trusts that pay claims, and veterans may qualify for VA benefits. Learn about disability benefits.

The refinery or plant where I worked has closed. Can I still file?

Possibly. Ownership may have passed to a successor company, and old insurance policies may still respond. Even where the premises claim is difficult, product and trust claims tied to the same worksite frequently remain open.

Can my family sue the property owner if asbestos came home on my clothes?

In some states, yes. A number of states recognize take-home claims, where fibers carried home on a worker's clothes made a spouse or child sick. Others, including Texas, have largely rejected them against property owners, especially for exposure before the 1970s. Claims against the product manufacturers and trusts are often available either way.

How long do I have to file a premises claim?

It depends on your state, and some deadlines are short and can start running from the date of diagnosis. Call promptly so the clock doesn't run out before the claim is filed.