Amber R. Long

The Warning on the Bag

Willis Edenfield died before he could identify the asbestos he handled in a New Jersey batching room. Amber Long reconstructed exposure from freight records, package sizes, coworkers, and a label that warned of harm without naming cancer—then defended the resulting verdict through the state’s highest court.

Fifty-Six Thousand Pounds

Willis Edenfield spent roughly forty years at an adhesive plant in Bloomfield, New Jersey. In a batching room about twenty feet square, he opened bags, poured and weighed their contents, and sent measured batches onward. Union Carbide shipped 56,000 pounds of Calidria asbestos to the plant from 1969 through 1984 in ten- and forty-pound bags. Another supplier delivered much larger packages.

Edenfield died before suit was filed and never identified a manufacturer in a deposition. A coworker remembered him handling the smaller bags. Freight records fixed the quantity, package sizes, and years of Union Carbide’s shipments. Long combined those records with former employees’ testimony to connect Calidria to Edenfield’s station. Union Carbide answered that no witness recalled its brand and disputed whether the dose could cause pleural mesothelioma.

The circumstantial proof was concrete: invoices placed a defined product inside a defined plant during Edenfield’s employment. The package dimensions matched the bags a coworker saw him open. The confined batching room supplied the place of exposure. In January 2019, the jury found that Union Carbide’s inadequate warning was a proximate cause of the exposure and that the exposure substantially contributed to Edenfield’s disease. It awarded his estate $2.38 million.

A Warning for Each Audience

Union Carbide began marking Calidria bags in 1968 with a warning that breathing dust may be harmful. Its 1972 label said asbestos dust could cause serious bodily harm, but did not identify cancer. Company medical material had already associated asbestos with mesothelioma after slight exposure and latency of twenty to forty years. Later proposals recommended naming cancer. The label that reached Edenfield remained less specific.

Long carried Edenfield’s estate to the New Jersey Supreme Court. On June 30, 2022, the court reinstated the $2.38 million verdict and held that an asbestos supplier breaches its duty to workers when the warning placed on workplace bags is inadequate, even if separate safety information reaches the employer. It also upheld the trial judge’s substantial-factor instruction.

Replacement Parts and Continuing Duty

Arthur Whelan’s exposure record involved steam traps, boilers, automobile brakes, and valves. Some asbestos-containing parts were original. Others were replacement gaskets, insulation, brake linings, and packing made by third parties and installed during maintenance. Product manufacturers obtained summary judgment on the theory that they had neither made nor sold the later components.

Long later argued as amicus curiae for the New Jersey Association for Justice in Whelan. In 2020, the New Jersey Supreme Court held that a manufacturer may owe a warning duty for replacement components when asbestos was integral to the original product, routine maintenance required similar asbestos parts, and exposure to those replacements substantially contributed to disease. The court sent the claims back for further proceedings under that rule.

The court extended a manufacturer’s duty to certain replacement components without making it responsible for every later attachment. The plaintiff still had to prove that the original design required routine replacement with similar parts and that those parts caused the disease. Long continued trying asbestos claims. In April 2024, she tried a federal New Jersey case against a gasket manufacturer on behalf of a former Navy machinist and refinery employee; the jury returned an award after the defendant made no pre-verdict settlement offer.

Four Winds and Daytop Claims

Long’s current practice also includes representation of people who allege sexual abuse while confined as minors in residential treatment. In December 2024, Levy Konigsberg reported that Long and Rebecca Kimmel filed complaints for twenty former patients of Four Winds Hospital. The complaints allege childhood abuse by staff during inpatient psychiatric treatment and failures of supervision and protection that permitted it. The complaints remain unadjudicated.

In March 2025, the firm reported another filing by Long and Kimmel for twenty-three former residents of Daytop New Jersey adolescent substance-use facilities. That complaint alleges abuse by staff and failures of supervision by Daytop and the State of New Jersey. The filing also describes young people placed at Daytop through state referral or court-mandated programs. The Daytop allegations also remain unadjudicated.

How Exposure Is Reconstructed

Long’s asbestos cases show how exposure can be proved when the worker cannot identify a brand decades later. Nash’s daily route through the bus garage, Edenfield’s package sizes and freight records, and Whelan’s maintenance cycle each supplied a different bridge between product and disease. The proof came from routines, invoices, coworkers, labels, and the design of equipment meant to be serviced repeatedly.

Trial was only one stage. In Nash, Long preserved the liability finding through post-trial review. In Fowler, she defended a circumstantial verdict through the New Jersey Supreme Court and secured a rule requiring an adequate warning to reach the worker, even when information had also gone to the employer. In Whelan, her amicus argument helped define the duty attached to replacement components integral to the original product.

What a Warning Must Do

A warning is useful only if it identifies the danger clearly enough for the person handling the product to respond. “Breathing dust may be harmful” did not name cancer or the latency that could separate exposure from mesothelioma by decades. Long’s work in Fowler placed the language on the bag beside what the supplier’s own medical material said.

Her current abuse cases concern a different institutional setting, but the evidentiary task again begins with records and control: who was responsible for supervision, what safeguards existed, and how a closed facility responded when a young person depended on it for protection. Those claims remain to be adjudicated. Across both parts of her practice, Long builds the route from an individual account to the documents and duties held by the institution.