Product Identification

Product identification is the evidence showing which specific asbestos-containing products a person was exposed to, and which companies made or sold them. In an asbestos case, a patient generally has to connect their illness to particular products by particular defendants, not just to asbestos in general. This proof can come from the patient's own memory, coworker testimony, purchase and job records, or scientific analysis of fibers.

Origin

The term comes from ordinary product-liability law, where a plaintiff must identify the product that caused harm. In asbestos litigation it took on special weight because workers were often exposed to many brands over decades, and courts required plaintiffs to tie their exposure to each defendant's product.

Significance in Asbestos Context

For a patient, product identification is often the make-or-break part of the case. Because asbestos diseases appear decades after exposure, and because job sites used products from dozens of manufacturers, proving whose product was present can be the hardest task. Your legal team works to reconstruct where you worked, what you handled, and which brands were there, using your recollection, testimony from coworkers, invoices, and sometimes fiber analysis of your tissue. The stronger the identification of each defendant's product, the harder it is for that company to argue it played no part.

Example Sentence

Her lawyers built product identification by locating a retired coworker who remembered the specific brand of insulating cement used at the shipyard in the 1960s.

Related Terms

Provenance Analysis, Fiber Burden Analysis, Occupational Exposure, Chain of Custody, Interrogatories, Bare Metal Defense

Notes

• Write down every job, worksite, and product brand you can recall, with dates; small details help identify defendants.
• Save any old pay stubs, union records, purchase receipts, or photographs that show where you worked and what materials were present.
• Names of coworkers and supervisors matter, since a coworker's memory can identify a product you can't name yourself.