Quigley Asbestos Trust Claims

If you worked around furnaces and high-heat equipment in a steel mill, glass plant, foundry, or refinery and later developed mesothelioma or another asbestos disease, the refractory cement used to line that equipment may be the reason, and the company that made much of it, Quigley, left behind a trust built to pay these claims.

For most of the twentieth century, Quigley made the refractory cements that lined the hottest equipment in heavy industry. Its flagship product, Insulag, and a family of related cements were mixed, troweled, and packed into furnaces, boilers, ladles, and ovens in steel mills, glass plants, and foundries across the country, and from the 1930s until the mid-1970s those cements were made with chrysotile asbestos. Quigley became a subsidiary of a large pharmaceutical company in 1968, and the weight of asbestos sickness eventually pushed it into bankruptcy. Its reorganization, finalized in 2013, set up a trust funded with more than $700 million, including a large contribution from its former parent, that's been paying mesothelioma and other asbestos claims since. That trust is one of the larger ones still paying.

You don't need to have kept records, and you don't need to remember that the cement was Quigley's or that the brand was Insulag. The trust accepts sworn statements, coworker accounts, and work records to document exposure, and its own rules say you don't have to have named Quigley in any lawsuit or other claim to recover here. Reconstructing the exposure is our job, not yours. If you can tell us the work you did and where, we have a place to start.

What the Quigley trust pays

For mesothelioma, the Quigley trust's scheduled value is $200,000, and a claim taken through Individual Review can reach as high as $450,000. Those are the trust's full values, before its payment percentage is applied, which we explain further down. Mesothelioma sits at the top of the trust's seven-level schedule:

Lung cancer 2 (Level V) has no fixed scheduled value, shown above as an em-dash; a claim at that level is handled through Individual Review. The two lowest levels cover milder asbestosis and pleural disease at set amounts. As with most trusts, mesothelioma's maximum value sits far above its scheduled value, which is why a serious claim is usually worth the closer Individual Review look.

These are one trust's values, not your whole recovery, and two things matter when you read them. First, every figure is reduced by the trust's payment percentage before it reaches you, which is how a finite fund stretches across the people still to be diagnosed; we explain that below. Second, Quigley's refractory cement was rarely the only asbestos a furnace or mill worker handled, so the same career usually supports claims against other trusts and defendants too. For many people the Quigley claim is one piece of a larger recovery.

How Quigley's products exposed workers to asbestos

Quigley made refractory cement, the heat-resistant material that lines the inside of the hottest equipment in heavy industry. The company, founded in 1916, built its name on a product called Insulag, an insulating refractory cement, and over the years it added a family of related cements. From the 1930s until 1974, those cements were made with chrysotile asbestos, which let them stand up to extreme heat. They went into the furnaces, boilers, ladles, ovens, and kilns of steel mills, iron foundries, glass plants, refineries, and powerhouses, anywhere equipment ran hot enough to need a refractory lining. Quigley became a subsidiary of a large pharmaceutical company in 1968 and stopped making the asbestos cements in the mid-1970s.

Refractory cement isn't a sealed product. It's a consumable, mixed from dry bags on site and applied wet, which means the dust came at the worker twice. It came first in the mixing: cutting open bags of dry cement and stirring the powder into water threw asbestos into the air before the material ever touched the furnace. And it came again at tear-out: when a lining wore out, crews chipped, jackhammered, and swept out the old, baked-hard refractory to reline the equipment, which is some of the dustiest work in an industrial plant. See how asbestos refractory products caused exposure.

Because the cement went wherever high heat did, the people who breathed it spanned the heavy-industry trades: the refractory and furnace masons who packed and patched the linings, the boilermakers and millwrights who rebuilt the equipment, the steel, glass, and foundry workers who ran it, and the insulators and laborers who worked alongside them in the same hot, dusty buildings. Quigley's own plant workers were exposed making the cement in the first place.

A Quigley claim is also rarely a claim about Quigley alone. A working life around furnaces and high-heat equipment meant a plant full of other companies' asbestos, the block and pipe insulation, the gaskets and packing, the competing brands of refractory, and the same work that exposed a worker to Quigley cement usually exposed him to all of it. We come back to that below, because it's where much of the recovery is.

How the Quigley bankruptcy created the asbestos trust

By the 1990s, Quigley had stopped operating, but the asbestos claims from its decades of refractory cement kept coming, and they fell to the company that had bought it in 1968. In 2004, Quigley Company, Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the kind that lets a company resolve its liabilities through a court-supervised plan, in the Southern District of New York.

The reorganization runs on a part of the bankruptcy law written specifically for asbestos, Section 524(g). It lets a court set up a trust to take over a company's asbestos liability and issue a channeling injunction, a court order that routes every asbestos claim, the ones already filed and the ones still to surface, into the trust. The trade is straightforward: the company and those connected to it fund the trust, and in return they're protected from being sued over Quigley's asbestos again. Quigley's case was a long one, but the plan was confirmed and the trust took effect in 2013.

The trust was funded on a large scale, with more than $700 million, the bulk of it a contribution from Quigley's former corporate parent together with a major insurance settlement. That funding is why the Quigley trust is one of the larger asbestos trusts still paying today.

The company itself is gone. Quigley stopped operating as a business decades ago; by the time the trust was created, it was an empty shell, and the trust holds what's left of it. What that means for you is simple and reassuring: there's no live company whose workers or finances your claim could touch. The trust is what remains, it was funded specifically to pay these claims, and the product and exposure records behind them were preserved as part of building it.

What the Quigley trust pays, and why it's a percentage

The trust pays set amounts based on your diagnosis, scaled to how serious the disease is, with mesothelioma at the top of the schedule and the milder non-malignant conditions lower down. The full breakdown by disease is in the table near the top of this page.

How you file decides which of those amounts is within reach, because the trust offers two tracks:

• Expedited Review is the fast track. If your diagnosis and exposure fit the trust's preset criteria, the claim is paid the fixed scheduled value (the trust's set amount) for your disease level, with a quicker turnaround.
• Individual Review is the evidence-based track. Instead of the fixed figure, the trust weighs the specifics of your case and can pay up to the much higher maximum value. For mesothelioma we always do a thorough exposure-history investigation to determine whether filing Individual Review is warranted, because the gap between the scheduled and the maximum value, $200,000 against $450,000, is large enough to matter to your family.

Whichever track you file, the trust doesn't pay the full value of the claim. Like every asbestos trust, it pays a percentage of it, so a finite fund can reach everyone it owes, including the families who won't be diagnosed for years. That's the same principle behind every bankruptcy: the law shares what there is across everyone harmed, instead of paying a lucky few in full and leaving the rest with nothing.

Quigley is unusual in that it has two payment percentages rather than one, and which applies turns on the particulars of your claim, including a decision about releasing claims connected to Quigley's former parent. The two rates are far apart, the higher one several times the lower, so this isn't a footnote, it's part of the strategy of the claim, and it interacts with your diagnosis, your state, and the other claims you may have. It's exactly the kind of case-specific call we handle, and we work from the rate that fits your situation. As of late 2025 the trust adjusted both rates downward, a reminder that the percentage moves over time, so we confirm the current figures against the trust's notices when your claim is filed.

Is the Quigley trust still able to pay?

Yes, and here's the honest picture from its most recent annual report, because a trust that recently lowered what it pays naturally raises the question.

• More than $516 million on hand. At the end of 2025 the trust held over half a billion dollars in net assets. This is a large fund, one of the bigger asbestos trusts, funded originally with more than $700 million.
• It's paying out faster than it earns. In 2025 the trust paid nearly $60 million in claims, more than its investments brought in that year, so the fund drew down by about $30 million, as it also did the year before. That's a fund steadily working through a large volume of claims, not a sign of trouble, but it's the reason the trust manages its payment percentage carefully.
• It recently trimmed the percentage to make the money last. In late 2025 the trust reduced its payment percentages. That's the reserve mechanism doing its job, holding back enough so the families diagnosed years from now are paid too, and it's worth understanding rather than fearing.

A large fund that's drawing down and has trimmed its rate is exactly why the Quigley claim is usually one piece of a larger recovery rather than the whole of it. The trust is open, funded, and paying right now, and a claim filed today is paid at the current percentage. We track the annual reporting and can walk through the full financial picture with you when you call.

Who qualifies for a Quigley trust claim

A trust claim rests on two things: a qualifying asbestos diagnosis, and proof that you were exposed to Quigley asbestos during the period the trust covers. The diagnosis side is medical. The exposure side is where the trust's rules come in, and where most of our work happens.

The exposure has to fall before the end of 1982. The Quigley trust pays on asbestos exposure from before the end of 1982. In practice Quigley stopped making its asbestos cements in 1974, so almost any qualifying exposure falls well within that window, and the date is rarely the obstacle people fear. We lay out the full logic, and your options if your exposure came later, in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work.

For mesothelioma, you don't need heavy exposure. Mesothelioma can come from brief, limited exposure, and the trust recognizes that: a meso claim asks for credible exposure to Quigley asbestos and doesn't have to clear the higher dose threshold that applies to the other diseases. That threshold, Significant Occupational Exposure (SOE), is about five years of total asbestos work with at least two of those years before the end of 1982, and it applies to lung cancer, the other cancers, and the more serious asbestosis claims. Importantly, SOE counts work done near the dust, not only handling the material yourself, so a worker who shared a furnace floor with the crews mixing and tearing out Quigley cement qualifies on the same footing.

The trust pays milder disease too, at lower amounts. Quigley has levels for milder asbestosis and pleural disease, paid at small set amounts, in addition to the severe-asbestosis and cancer levels. They're modest, but they can be worth filing alongside other claims.

You don't have to have named Quigley anywhere else. The trust's rules are explicit on a point that helps a lot of people: failing to identify Quigley products in your lawsuit, or in claims to other asbestos trusts, doesn't bar you from recovering here, as long as you meet the trust's own medical and exposure requirements. A claim does have to rest on real exposure to a Quigley product, not on the company's name alone, but you don't need to have flagged Quigley in every other matter to qualify.

Family members can qualify too. The trust's rules expressly contemplate claims based on secondary exposure, the dust a worker carried home, so a spouse who laundered the work clothes or a child in the household can file on the worker's exposure history. How take-home asbestos exposure works.

How the trust documents your exposure

Quigley didn't keep the kind of customer-by-customer worksite list some trusts use, and it doesn't need to. Its rules build the proof around the product instead: a sworn statement from you, an account from a coworker who remembers Quigley cement or Insulag on the job, a family member's statement for someone who has passed, and employment, invoice, and construction records all count. For a furnace or mill worker who spent years around refractory cement, that exposure is usually well within reach to document, even decades later. Putting it together, in the form the trust requires, is our job.

How a Quigley claim gets filed

A trust claim isn't a lawsuit, and that surprises people who expect a courtroom. There's no judge, no jury, no deposition, and no defense lawyer arguing the other side. You're submitting a documented claim to a fund that already exists to pay it, and the trust reviews it against its written rules and pays on its schedule.

What the claim needs is proof of two things: your diagnosis, and your exposure to Quigley asbestos during the covered period. Putting that together is our job, not yours. We gather the medical records, reconstruct the work history, document the exposure the way the trust's rules require, and choose the track, Expedited or Individual Review, that fits your situation. You don't need to have kept paperwork or remember product names to start.

The Quigley trust has been paying claims since the mid-2010s and is still accepting them today, so the door is open. The fuller mechanics of how trust claims are prepared, filed, and paid are laid out in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work. When you call, we'll tell you what your specific claim is likely to involve and how the timeline tends to run.

A Quigley claim is rarely the only one

Here's the part that changes the math for most families: the Quigley trust is usually one claim out of several, and the others come from the very same work.

Start with the setting. A furnace, a steel mill, a glass plant, a foundry, none of them contained only Quigley's asbestos. The equipment Quigley's cement lined was wrapped in other companies' block and pipe insulation, sealed with other makers' gaskets and packing, and patched with competing brands of refractory, much of it made by companies that also went bankrupt and left their own trusts, including others in the refractory business. The work that exposed a man to Quigley cement exposed him to a stack of other asbestos products at the same time.

The same history that supports your Quigley claim usually supports claims against several of those other trusts, and because each trust reviews and pays independently, the claims don't compete with each other. They add up. How asbestos trust claims work.

This matters more for a Quigley claim than for some, because the trust pays a modest percentage that it recently reduced. On its own, a Quigley claim is one share of a larger whole; built alongside the other trusts and the lawsuits and benefits that can run with it, it's part of something much larger. We walk through a full worked example, several trusts totaled across one career, in our guide to mesothelioma trust settlement values. The full set of channels beyond the trusts is laid out next.

Sources of compensation beyond the Quigley trust

A Quigley claim usually sits inside a larger recovery, and the channels run in parallel without canceling one another out. We file across all of them that apply.

• Asbestos bankruptcy trusts. Quigley is one, and as the section above explains, a furnace or mill career almost always reaches several others. They review and pay independently, so they stack. How asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Many of the other companies whose asbestos a furnace or mill worker handled are still in business and can be sued directly for making and selling a product they knew was dangerous, and a lawsuit can recover more than a trust claim, though it takes longer. How asbestos product liability lawsuits work.
• Premises liability against the site owners. The steel mills, glass plants, foundries, and refineries where this work was done can be held responsible for the conditions they allowed, separate from the companies that made the products. How premises liability claims work.
• Federal and disability benefits. These depend on where and how the work was done, and they're paid on top of the trust and lawsuit recovery. Military service, including work around shipboard boilers and high-heat equipment, can support VA disability benefits; civilian shipyard work can support Longshore benefits (LHWCA, the federal program for maritime and harbor workers); civilian work at a federal facility can support FECA benefits (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act); and Social Security disability is available to anyone whose illness stops them from working. How asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

Your Quigley trust claim has no defenses to answer. It's a paper claim: no opposing lawyer, no deposition, no courtroom, no one arguing the other side. Quigley's liability was resolved when the trust was funded, and the trust either pays the claim or it doesn't, on its written rules.

Defenses only come up on the lawsuit side, the claims that run alongside the trust against the manufacturers still in business and the site owners where you worked. Those defendants raise the same handful of arguments they raise in most asbestos cases, and none of them is new to us. The short version is that each one describes a cleaner, smaller version of the work than the one your loved one actually did, and the evidence answers it.