Anne McGinness Kearse

Warehouses, Attics, and the Library of Congress

Anne McGinness Kearse's first jobs in asbestos litigation were on the other side.

As an undergraduate at Syracuse studying consumer studies, she researched and advocated for the New York Public Interest Research Group. She then worked as a litigation researcher and paralegal for firms representing school districts and building owners trying to get asbestos-containing products out of their buildings.

Then she changed sides, to the workers who had handled those products and were dying from them.

The work in those years was physical. Old files in warehouses, in buildings, in attics, and then months at the Library of Congress going through stacks of material. But the paper came with people attached. The job put her in rooms with workers and their families, and what she took from those months, she has said, was less the documents than the chance to understand from the people themselves what they had been exposed to and what it had cost them.

She had two young children. Ron Motley — by then her mentor, later her partner — told her she could do more for these families as their lawyer than as their researcher. She enrolled at the University of South Carolina School of Law and graduated summa cum laude in 1998.

The Clerkship

As a law clerk, Kearse worked with Motley Rice attorneys on the team representing state attorneys general against the tobacco industry. That litigation produced the Master Settlement Agreement. Shortly afterward she joined the trial team in Falise v. American Tobacco Co., brought by the Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust.

She became a Motley Rice member in 2003.

Dust That Came Home on a Shirt

Leonard Cox never installed asbestos. He was a child.

His father, Cecil, installed asbestos insulation at DuPont's chemical plant in Belle, West Virginia, from the 1940s into the 1970s, and came home each day carrying it on his clothes and his body.

Leonard grew up in that house. He became a banker, and eventually chief executive of the Bank of Gassaway. He was diagnosed with mesothelioma at fifty-two and died in 2000 at fifty-three.

Kearse tried Cox v. A&I Company with Ron Motley, Don Migliori, and James Barber. The case required reconstructing a plant's operating history, the products used inside it, and the ordinary domestic routine of a family in the 1950s — who did the laundry, where the work clothes were kept — across a latency period of half a century. The proof came from DuPont's own dust-control records: documents establishing what was in the air at Belle and what the company did to keep it from leaving the gates on people.

The jury accepted a proposition not then established in West Virginia — that asbestos carried home from a workplace could cause fatal disease in a child who never set foot in it. The family recovered approximately $6.4 million: $1.7 million in lost earnings, $118,000 in medical expenses, $2 million for Cox's pain and suffering, $2 million for his widow, and $300,000 for each child. It was West Virginia's first household asbestos-exposure case.

Kearse has said the public misconception she would most like to correct is that asbestos is a thing of the past. In household cases, the exposure and the diagnosis can be fifty years apart.

Thousands of Workers, One Common Phase

In 2002, Kearse served as co-counsel with Ron Motley in West Virginia's consolidated asbestos proceeding against Union Carbide.

The structure had two stages. A common phase would resolve, once, the questions that were the same for every claimant: what conditions had existed at the plants, what the industry knew, and who was responsible. Individual trials would then address each worker's own exposure and damages.

The jury found that unsafe conditions at five Union Carbide worksites in West Virginia had exposed thousands of workers — and then did something with lasting consequence. It attached a three-times multiplier to compensatory damages, so that whatever each worker went on to prove in his own individual trial, Union Carbide would owe him that amount and three times that amount again. One jury's finding in one proceeding set the terms for every case behind it.

Kearse has called it the most personally meaningful result of her career.

In a later West Virginia matter she and her co-counsel represented Robert and Candice Wood. The liability phase turned on whether an adequate warning had ever reached the men handling asbestos-containing gaskets. In November 2010, a unanimous jury found John Crane liable for failing to warn.

Cell 90

Cell 90 stood eighteen feet above the floor of Boeing's North Charleston plant. Eighteen motorized sliders extended from a stationary platform toward the curved fuselage of a 787, so that employees could reach the aircraft during production. The intended gap between platform and plane was no more than three inches.

On March 18, 2013, David Priester Jr. and three co-workers came back from a break. The fuselage had rotated, and the crew redeployed the sliders.

Slider No. 2 stopped before it reached the aircraft. The other seventeen went out.

Priester fell through the opening onto the concrete below. He was thirty-eight. A severe traumatic brain injury killed him eleven days later. He left his wife, Lisa, and two young daughters.

Lisa Priester filed suit in federal court in March 2014, individually and for his estate. Kearse tried the case with Kevin Dean and W. Taylor Lacy before Judge David C. Norton in the District of South Carolina.

The case was about commissioning — the process by which hardware, software, sensors, alarms, brakes and interlocks are made to work as a single system before any worker steps onto it. The plaintiffs argued that completed control logic should have retracted every slider the moment one failed to deploy, and that lights and horns should have announced the gap that had just opened. The court let the jury decide whether SAR Automation's commissioning role made it answerable for the finished system under the governing industry standard.

After two weeks the jury found the platform defective, found SAR Automation negligent, rejected assumption of risk, and assigned it ninety-five percent of the fault. The August 24, 2017 verdict was $8.8 million: $800,000 on the survival claim, $3.65 million for loss of consortium, and $4.35 million for wrongful death.

Flavoring, Gaskets, and Borders

Kearse represents workers exposed to diacetyl and other airborne flavoring chemicals, and has obtained settlements for people who developed respiratory disease from breathing them. With Scott Hall she has worked with physicians and industrial-hygiene specialists to train worker advocates in prevention — the part of the practice that operates before anyone becomes a client.

She also represents Canadian Workers' Compensation Boards in United States courts, recovering benefits paid to Canadian asbestos claimants from the American manufacturers and trusts responsible for the exposure. She is a member of Motley Rice's prescription-opioid team representing states, counties, and municipalities.

A Legal Limit Is Not a Safe Level

OSHA's asbestos limit is 0.1 fiber per cubic centimeter, measured as an eight-hour average.

Kearse has written that a number like that is a legal threshold, not a promise. OSHA itself acknowledges that many of its chemical-exposure limits are outdated and directs employers toward more protective occupational standards where they exist.

The gap between the two is where her cases live. Asbestos fibers are invisible without magnification and the disease can take decades to appear, so a workplace can satisfy a measurement taken on a Tuesday and still be the reason someone dies in 2050. An eight-hour average does not see the twenty minutes when a gasket is scraped off dry.

Public Justice

Kearse joined the board of the Public Justice Foundation in 2010 and became its president for the 2016–2017 term.

She chaired the American Association for Justice's Asbestos Litigation Group for many years and serves on the executive committee of its Section on Toxic, Environmental and Pharmaceutical Torts. She helped create a women's caucus within the South Carolina Association for Justice, serves on that organization's Board of Governors, and is a founding member of Charleston Legal Access. She co-authored a chapter on the medicolegal aspects of asbestos-related disease in Pathology of Asbestos-Associated Diseases.

Her law school gave her its Compleat Lawyer Award in 2018, an honor previously received by mentors including Joe Rice, and South Carolina Lawyers Weekly gave her its Leadership in Law award in 2020. She is admitted in South Carolina, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia.