Johns-Manville Form 10-K for 1973: Legal Proceedings (1974)

The cover and the asbestos paragraph of Johns-Manville's annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission for the year ended December 31, 1973, the company's first public disclosure of the asbestos lawsuits. As of December 31, 1973, J-M was a defendant or co-defendant in 24 lawsuits over asbestos health claims by people who were not its employees; five more had been filed since, and one had been settled. The company said it had "adequate legal defenses and insurance coverage" and did not expect the suits to have "a material adverse effect on the Company's earnings or financial position."

What it shows

The paragraph is short. Claims by J-M's own employees and former employees, it says, were "adequately covered by applicable workmen's compensation laws in the United States and Canada," so only the outside suits are counted. These were cases brought by insulation workers and others who used J-M products; the Fifth Circuit had upheld the verdict in one of them, Borel v. Fibreboard, in September 1973.

Four years earlier, in April 1970, J-M's chairman had told the board that the company was "presently defending a number of law suits" and that "any one of these suits might trigger publicity about asbestos/health related hazards" (board minutes, 1968 to 1972). The lawyers' chronology marks this 10-K as "the first public disclosure of the asbestos litigation."