Chris J. Panatier

The Contractor Outside the Payroll

Dennis Seay repaired pumps, valves, condensers, and other equipment inside a South Carolina polyester plant for nine years. The company argued that Seay’s maintenance work made him a statutory employee, which would limit the family to workers’ compensation and bar the tort suit. Chris Panatier carried the family’s case through trial and two appellate courts.

Seay worked at the Spartanburg plant from 1971 through 1980. His paycheck came from Daniel Construction Company, the contractor hired to perform the plant’s maintenance. His days placed him around asbestos-containing gaskets, packing, and insulation. More than three decades later, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma.

The diagnosis came in August 2013. Seay and his wife, Linda, filed suit that September. He died from advanced disease in December 2014, and his daughter Angie Keene continued the action for his estate while Linda pursued the losses carried by a spouse.

The legal threshold preceded every question about warnings, exposure, and damages. South Carolina’s statutory-employee doctrine can treat a contractor’s worker as an employee of the owner when the contracted work is part of the owner’s trade, business, or occupation. If that classification applied, the Workers’ Compensation Act supplied the exclusive remedy and the tort action ended.

Nine Days in Spartanburg

Panatier tried the case with Kevin Paul and South Carolina counsel. The trial lasted nine days. The family showed that Seay opened and repaired equipment insulated or sealed with asbestos materials. It also presented evidence that Celanese had received information associating mesothelioma with even slight exposure and that earlier industrial literature recommended warnings, respiratory protection, and dust controls.

Medical records documented the disease. Fluid was drained from Seay’s lungs eleven times. He underwent three lung surgeries. Collapsed lungs temporarily left him unable to breathe. Chemotherapy caused sickness and dehydration. Scar tissue produced constant pain, and medication brought little relief.

During Angie Keene’s testimony, the jury saw a brief hospice video in which her father cried out in pain. The company later challenged its admission. The Court of Appeals held that the objection had not been made contemporaneously and that the video reflected suffering already established through other testimony.

The jury awarded $2 million on the survival claim, $5 million for wrongful death, and $5 million for Linda Seay’s loss of consortium. It found the conduct willful, wanton, and reckless and added $2 million in punitive damages.

The Workers’ Compensation Defense

The South Carolina Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in 2019. The court affirmed the classification ruling, the evidentiary decisions, the damages, and the rejection of a mistrial request.

The South Carolina Supreme Court then took the statutory-employee question. By that point, state courts had long evaluated whether contracted work was important, necessary, integral, or historically performed by the owner’s employees. The Supreme Court re-centered the doctrine on the business decision the owner had actually made.

Hoechst Celanese had deliberately outsourced maintenance and repair. Its contract required the contractor’s workers to be insured, and the company paid for that protection. The choice reflected a legitimate definition of its business rather than an effort to evade responsibility for uninsured labor.

On August 11, 2021, the Supreme Court affirmed. Seay was not transformed into Celanese’s employee merely because maintenance kept the plant operating. The South Carolina Supreme Court left the family’s tort judgment intact and clarified how courts determine the boundaries of a company’s chosen business.

Four Kinds of Loss

The Seay verdict separated harms that are often collapsed into one headline. The survival award belonged to the injuries Dennis Seay experienced before death. Wrongful-death damages addressed what his death caused the statutory beneficiaries. Loss of consortium measured Linda Seay’s injury to the marital relationship. Punitive damages responded to the jury’s finding about the defendant’s conduct.

On appeal, the four categories could not be treated as interchangeable. The hospice video bore on Seay’s suffering; family testimony supported the relationship losses; and historic safety material and company knowledge supplied the conduct evidence relevant to punitive damages. Each award thus rose or fell on a distinct evidentiary record and legal purpose.

Powder on the Dressing Table

Judith Winkel’s exposure occurred in a different room. From 1961 through 1976, she used Cashmere Bouquet body powder. The product entered ordinary household air during a familiar personal routine. She was diagnosed with mesothelioma in January 2014 at age seventy-three.

Panatier, David Greenstone, and Kyle Tracy represented Judith and her husband in Los Angeles. Panatier and the team traced the talc’s historical sources, product composition, testing, use, inhalation, and disease. Colgate-Palmolive denied that Cashmere Bouquet had caused her cancer.

After a two-week trial, jurors deliberated for approximately two hours. They found Colgate liable under negligence, design-defect, manufacturing-defect, failure-to-warn, and breach-of-warranty theories. They assigned the company ninety-five percent of the responsibility and returned approximately $13 million in compensatory damages.

The jury also found malice, allowing a punitive phase to proceed. The parties resolved that phase confidentially. The case applied asbestos product-liability law to Cashmere Bouquet, a consumer cosmetic.

Ten Thousand Applications

Joanne Anderson used Johnson’s Baby Powder on her children in the 1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s, she also powdered her hands and feet while bowling, sometimes using two bottles in a month. Her trial team estimated more than ten thousand applications before she developed pleural mesothelioma.

Panatier and Greenstone presented Anderson’s product-use history alongside mineral evidence, company documents, medical testimony, and possible exposure from automotive work performed by her husband. Johnson & Johnson denied that its powder contained asbestos and argued that other causes explained the disease.

The Los Angeles jury awarded $21.75 million in compensatory damages and $4 million in punitive damages in May 2018. It assigned sixty-seven percent of the compensatory responsibility to Johnson & Johnson and the balance to automotive asbestos exposure for which no company was held liable.

Johnson & Johnson announced an appeal and maintained its product-safety position. The jury’s findings were a trial verdict and allocation, not an affirmed judgment or documented payment. The lawyers presented Anderson’s decades of household use as cumulative exposure.

Eighty-Five Machines in One Room

Carl Rogers built tires at Goodyear’s Tyler, Texas, plant from 1974 until 2004. Eighty-five tire-building machines stood in a room approximately the size of a football field. Asbestos-containing brake pads were replaced on Rogers’s machine and the machines around him. Overhead pipes carried asbestos insulation. Maintenance workers used compressed air, raising visible dust.

Rogers had survived lung cancer treated with surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. When mesothelioma appeared in 2008, Goodyear argued that the earlier radiation rather than workplace asbestos caused it. Panatier and Darren McDowell had to prove both exposure and causal attribution against that competing medical history.

Industrial hygienists reconstructed dose from the insulated pipes and the machine brakes. Their conservative calculations limited the brake analysis to replacement work on Rogers’s machine and two neighboring machines even though as many as eight surrounded him. The combined estimate was expressed in fiber-years per cubic centimeter of air and compared with published mesothelioma-risk studies.

The experts also placed the plant’s practices against decades of occupational knowledge. Asbestos hazards had appeared in industrial literature since the 1930s. The plant did not post asbestos warnings until 1984. The tire-building machines carried no asbestos warning, and the company did not begin replacing them and abating insulation until the mid-1980s.

The Gross-Negligence Exception

Goodyear subscribed to Texas workers’ compensation. That ordinarily made workers’ compensation the exclusive remedy for a work-related death. Texas law, however, permits a surviving spouse and heirs to recover exemplary damages when the employer’s gross negligence caused the death.

After a three-week trial, the jury found by clear and convincing evidence that asbestos from the Tyler plant proximately caused Rogers’s mesothelioma and that his death resulted from Goodyear’s gross negligence. The jury’s broader findings totaled $18.6 million, including $15 million in exemplary damages. The trial court applied the statutory cap and entered a $2.89 million exemplary award.

The Dallas Court of Appeals upheld causation and gross negligence. It rejected the argument that the family had failed to exclude radiation as a cause and found legally sufficient evidence of both an extreme risk and Goodyear’s conscious indifference. The court required a further remittitur because the exemplary-damages cap depended on proved economic damages.

The family accepted the remittitur. A supplemental opinion modified the exemplary award to $1.15 million and affirmed the judgment as modified. The Texas Supreme Court later denied review. The final result preserved the gross-negligence finding while replacing the trial headline with the amount Texas law allowed after appeal.

Verdicts, Settlements, and Appellate Judgments

Winkel ended in a confidential resolution after a compensatory verdict and before the punitive phase. Anderson produced compensatory and punitive jury findings. Rogers ended with an affirmed $1.15 million exemplary award after Texas’s statutory cap and appellate remittitur. Seay’s $14 million judgment survived posttrial motions and appellate review.

Rafe Ledford’s Navy Exposure

Panatier’s earlier work already displayed the same discipline of product identification. Rafe Ledford served as a Navy machinist and worked around General Motors diesel engines. The case alleged that asbestos gaskets inside those engines released fibers during maintenance and contributed to his mesothelioma.

Panatier led the 2007 trial with Jessica Dean. To prove the naval-engine case, the team used service records, engine identification, gasket composition, industrial hygiene, pathology, epidemiology, and medical testimony. The jury returned a $1.12 million verdict.

Across Ledford, Winkel, Anderson, Seay, and Rogers, Panatier’s teams identified the product, reconstructed exposure, developed medical causation, and connected corporate knowledge to the governing duty.

Trial Lawyer, Artist, and Novelist

Panatier earned a humanities degree from the University of Texas in 1998 and graduated from its law school in 2001. He now serves as a shareholder and Executive Committee member at Simon Greenstone Panatier and remains focused on toxic-exposure trials.

Outside court, he works as a visual artist and novelist. His published books include The Phlebotomist, Stringers, the 2024 novel The Redemption of Morgan Bright, and Worry Box.