Anne McGinness Kearse

Eighteen Sliders above the Factory Floor

David Priester returned from break to an elevated Boeing work platform. Seventeen motorized sliders moved toward the aircraft. One stopped short, opening a space where the control system should have stopped movement, sounded alarms, and kept workers away.

Cell 90 stood eighteen feet above the floor of Boeing’s North Charleston plant. Its eighteen sliders extended from a stationary platform toward the curved fuselage of a 787 so employees could reach the aircraft during production. The intended clearance was no more than three inches.

On March 18, 2013, Priester and three co-workers returned after a break. The fuselage had rotated, and the crew redeployed the sliders. Slider No. 2 stopped before reaching the aircraft. The other seventeen continued. Priester later fell through the enlarged opening onto the concrete below.

He was thirty-eight. A severe traumatic brain injury led to his death eleven days later. He left his wife, Lisa, and two young daughters. Lisa filed suit in federal court in March 2014, individually and for his estate. Anne McGinness Kearse tried the case with Kevin Dean and W. Taylor Lacy.

Commissioning the Safety Sequence

The platform had passed through several companies. Futuramic designed it. Capital Welding fabricated and installed it. Intec Automated Controls supplied electronics and programming. SAR Automation later worked on the control system, including slider brakes and manual movement.

The trial focused on commissioning: the process of confirming that hardware, software, sensors, alarms, and interlocks operate together before workers rely on the equipment. The plaintiffs maintained that completed control logic should have stopped or retracted every slider when one failed to deploy. Lights and horns should have announced the opening and prevented entry into the slider area.

SAR contended that other companies controlled the programming and that the gap was visible. The district court left the product-defect and negligence questions for the jury, including whether SAR’s commissioning role made it responsible for the completed system under the governing industry standard.

Kearse’s team connected the accident to the missing sequence rather than to a single piece of steel. The platform’s components moved. The safety functions that should have coordinated them did not.

Ninety-Five Percent and $8.8 Million

After a two-week trial, the federal jury returned its verdict on August 24, 2017. It found the platform defective, found SAR negligent, rejected assumption of risk, and assigned ninety-five percent of the fault to SAR and five percent to Priester.

The $8.8 million award separated three forms of loss: $800,000 on the survival claim, $3.65 million for Lisa Priester’s loss of consortium, and $4.35 million for wrongful death. The verdict distinguished Priester’s suffering before death from the loss carried by his family afterward.

“From day one Lisa brought this lawsuit in the hopes that it would prevent future injuries in the workplace,” Kearse said. A safety system exists to act before a worker reaches the opening.

Dust on a Work Shirt

Leonard Cox never installed asbestos. His father, Cecil, installed asbestos insulation at DuPont’s Belle, West Virginia, chemical plant from the 1940s into the 1970s. The family’s case traced fibers from the plant to Cecil’s clothing and body and then into the home where Leonard grew up.

Leonard became a banker and chief executive of the Bank of Gassaway. He was diagnosed with mesothelioma at fifty-two and died in 2000 at fifty-three. Kearse and the team had to reconstruct the plant’s history, the products used there, the family’s household routines, the disease’s long latency, and the medical evidence connecting exposure to diagnosis.

Kearse tried the claim with Ron Motley, Don Migliori, and James Barber. It was one of five DuPont cases tried together in 2002 before two West Virginia circuit judges. Dozens of claims and multiple companies had originally been involved; the five DuPont matters remained for trial.

A Household Case before Two Judges

The jury awarded the Cox family approximately $6.4 million. The components included $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.

The jury accepted evidence that asbestos carried home from the plant could injure a child who never entered the workplace. The legal claim depended on the foreseeability of contamination traveling with the worker and the medical proof connecting that childhood exposure to disease many years later.

Kearse and the team used workplace dust-control records to show how asbestos traveled into the Cox home. Dust that looked like part of the workday became evidence of exposure inside the home.

Three Plants and Thirty-Five Years

Kearse also served as co-counsel with Ron Motley in West Virginia’s 2002 consolidated asbestos proceeding against Union Carbide. The jury considered conditions at three company worksites over more than thirty-five years and found that unsafe asbestos conditions had exposed thousands of workers.

The first phase addressed proof common to the workforce: plant conditions, products, warnings, industrial knowledge, safety practices, and corporate responsibility. The jury awarded compensatory and treble damages on the common liability record.

Individual claims then moved into smaller “mini-trials.” Those proceedings addressed the worker-specific questions that a common phase could not decide: job assignment, duration and intensity of exposure, product contact, diagnosis, alternative causes, medical history, family loss, and damages.

Liability First, Individual Disease Next

The structure allowed one jury to decide whether the plants were unsafe while preserving individualized adjudication. It avoided rebuilding decades of common industrial history in every case, yet it did not treat every worker’s disease as interchangeable.

Kearse’s current practice still moves between those two levels. Occupational disease cases require shared evidence about a workplace or product and a separate account of what happened to one person. The common record identifies the hazard. The individual record establishes exposure and consequence.

Gaskets and the Missing Warning

Robert L. Wood worked as a pipefitter in West Virginia and developed mesothelioma after alleged exposure to asbestos-containing gaskets. In November 2010, a unanimous circuit-court verdict found John Crane liable for failing to warn him about the hazards associated with its products.

Kearse joined Patrick O’Hara, C. Taylor Campbell, J.D. McMullen, Robert Leone, and Trey Jones in representing Wood and his wife, Candice. The liability phase centered on product identification, the work practices that released fibers, what the product supplier knew, and whether an adequate warning reached the worker who handled the gaskets.

The unanimous verdict established liability for failure to warn. The damages amount and any later payment were not publicly disclosed.

Benefits Paid in Canada, Liability Tried in the United States

Kearse also represents Canadian Workers’ Compensation Boards seeking to recoup benefits paid to Canadian asbestos victims through proceedings in United States courts. She uses those cases to recover public benefits from companies responsible for occupational disease across national borders.

The board has already paid statutory benefits. The United States litigation concerns whether a responsible product supplier or other defendant must reimburse some of that cost. Counsel must connect the worker’s employment and medical history to American products, defendants, trusts, or proceedings while preserving the board’s statutory subrogation rights.

Individual compensation and institutional reimbursement serve different functions. The worker receives benefits through the Canadian system. The board’s claim seeks to place the ultimate financial responsibility on the entity whose conduct or product produced the covered loss.

Flavoring Chemicals in the Air

Asbestos is only one part of Kearse’s occupational-health practice. She has represented flavoring workers who developed respiratory disease after exposure to diacetyl and other airborne chemicals used in baked goods, coffee, candy, pet food, microwave popcorn, and flavored products.

These cases require a different exposure record. Industrial hygienists reconstruct airborne concentrations, ventilation, mixing and heating processes, protective equipment, and the duration of tasks. Physicians distinguish bronchiolitis obliterans, emphysema, asthma, and other respiratory conditions from competing causes.

Kearse and Scott Hall later joined physicians and industrial-hygiene specialists in a National Council for Occupational Safety and Health program for worker advocates. The educational work carried lessons from client cases into prevention: identify the chemical, control the air, monitor the process, and recognize disease early.

A Legal Limit and a Safe Level

In July 2026, Kearse wrote about permissible exposure limits. OSHA’s asbestos standard uses 0.1 fiber per cubic centimeter of air as an eight-hour time-weighted limit while also requiring monitoring, engineering controls, protective equipment, regulated areas, and decontamination in specified settings.

Compliance with one number does not answer every safety question. OSHA itself acknowledges that many chemical-exposure limits are outdated or inadequate and directs employers toward more protective occupational limits where available.

Asbestos fibers are invisible without magnification, and disease may emerge decades after exposure. A workplace can therefore satisfy a measurement taken on one day while leaving unresolved questions about short peaks, uncontrolled maintenance, contaminated clothing, demolition, product disturbance, and cumulative exposure.

Early Work in Complex Litigation

Kearse entered complex litigation before law school as a trial paralegal. She supported the State Attorneys General tobacco litigation that culminated in the national Master Settlement Agreement, then graduated summa cum laude from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1998.

Early in practice, she joined the trial team in Falise v. American Tobacco Co., a case brought by the Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust. The litigation combined asbestos disease, smoking-asbestos synergy, trust accounting, RICO, fraud, epidemiology, and statistical modeling of payments from a finite trust corpus.

The experience established a recurring feature of her later work: medical causation and financial structure have to be tried together. A toxic exposure changes a person’s health, while the legal system must also determine which defendant, insurer, trust, compensation board, or public entity should bear the cost.

Public Justice and Public Clients

Kearse served as president of the Public Justice Foundation in 2016–2017 after years on its board and executive committee. The organization brings and supports litigation involving workers, consumers, civil rights, environmental protection, public health, and access to courts.

She also helped create a women’s caucus within the South Carolina Association for Justice, participated in the American Association for Justice’s toxic, environmental, and pharmaceutical tort section, and worked with Safe Kids and occupational-health advocates.

Her public-client work represents states, counties, cities, towns, and townships in litigation alleging corporate practices that affect entire communities. She works within coordinated teams on public-health, environmental, and consumer claims requiring common scientific and economic proof.

Safety Systems and Prevention

Her cases examine safety at several levels: platform interlocks and alarms at Cell 90; dust controls at chemical plants; product warnings for asbestos gaskets; airborne-chemical controls in flavoring facilities; and public-health rules intended to prevent exposure from reaching households and communities.

Kearse uses engineering, industrial-hygiene, warning, monitoring, and governance evidence to identify the controls that could have prevented the injury and the changes needed to protect later workers and families.