WARD: The Worldwide Asbestos Reference Desk

WARD is the Worldwide Asbestos Reference Desk, the research system behind the AsbestosClaims.Law Library. It holds the asbestos companies' own memos and letters, trial exhibits, medical studies, court decisions, trade magazines, product catalogs, and the people and companies that connect them. Reading it is free, with no account needed, and it grows every week.

The name is also a tribute. The initials honor Ward Stephenson, the Orange, Texas lawyer who represented Clarence Borel. His win in Borel v. Fibreboard (1973) established that asbestos manufacturers could be held responsible for failing to warn the workers who used their products. Every asbestos case since stands on that work, and so does this library.

How we use AI

Think of a professional kitchen. The sous chef does the prep and sets out everything the head chef needs, but the head chef decides what to cook, tastes everything, and nothing leaves the kitchen without the chef's approval.

That's how WARD works. It runs on our own proprietary tools, datasets and knowledge, built from years of asbestos litigation, used together with commercial and open-source AI models. They read scanned pages, index them, find the people and companies named, draft summaries, and check one source against another. A lawyer decides what matters, reads the sources, and approves what is published. When a page says a section was drafted with the assistance of WARD, this is what it means.

• Every page starts from a source. We don't publish anything we can't point back to an original document, and each one carries a permanent library number.
• Drafts are checked against the source before a lawyer reviews them. Legal framing is always a lawyer's call.
• Client information never leaves our office. Public and archival material (old corporate documents, published studies, court decisions, magazines) may be processed with commercial AI models. Medical records, work histories and anything about a client's case never go to an outside AI service; when we use AI on client files, it runs on open-source models on our own hardware.
• AI doesn't decide anything that matters. It doesn't decide whether to take a case or what a case is worth, give legal advice, or publish a quotation, number or date that hasn't been checked against the source.

Help us build it

Our mission is permanent: to build the largest public collection of asbestos history in the world. Much of that history still sits in attics, union halls, retired lawyers' offices and old company libraries. If you have company records, product catalogs or packaging, trade journals or union newsletters, older medical papers, public court filings or trial exhibits, or photographs and film of plants, mines and job sites, we'd like to hear from you.

Please don't send anything yet. Email [email protected] and tell us what you have, roughly how much, about how old it is, and how you came to have it. We'll work out the best way to handle it with you. Whatever is added to WARD is published free for everyone, with credit to you if you'd like. Please don't send records under a protective order or seal, or anyone's private medical records.

How to cite the Library, what we leave out to protect privacy, and how to ask us to correct or remove something are on About the Library.