Jared Hausmann
Asbestos Litigation · Post-Trial Motions · Appeals
I became an attorney to help individuals vindicate their rights.
Asbestos Proof Preserved through Appeal
Munir Seen came to the United States from Jordan in the late 1960s and went to work in construction in New York and New Jersey. He used powdered joint compound from bags marked “Kaiser,” mixing it with water, applying it to drywall and, following the manufacturer’s directions, sanding it smooth. He later worked as a security guard until he was forced to retire early, and in 2016, after he developed shortness of breath, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma.
A Deposition Before Kaiser Arrived
Seen sued in 2018. On March 15, 2019, his testimony was recorded on video to preserve it for trial. Kaiser Gypsum was brought into the case the next month as a third-party defendant, and its lawyers later took their own deposition of him. He died on July 3, 2019, at 69, leaving two grown children and four grandchildren.
Kaiser was the only remaining defendant when the case was tried in July 2022 before Justice Suzanne J. Adams of the New York County Supreme Court. Daniel P. Blouin of Simmons Hanly Conroy led the family’s trial team, and both of Seen’s children testified. After three weeks of trial and 45 minutes of deliberation, the jury unanimously awarded $15 million for the pain and suffering Seen endured before his death, assigned 70 percent of the fault to Kaiser and 30 percent to a company that had settled, and found that Kaiser had acted with reckless disregard for the safety of others.
Seen and New York Causation Law
Three months before the trial, on April 26, 2022, New York’s Court of Appeals had decided Nemeth v. Brenntag North America, a case over Desert Flower talcum powder. There a geologist’s glove-box test had measured the asbestos the powder released, and Judge Michael J. Garcia wrote for the majority that the test “failed to provide any scientific expression linking decedent’s actual exposure to asbestos” to a level known to cause mesothelioma.
Kaiser argued that the Seen estate’s proof had the same defect. In March 2023 Justice Adams denied Kaiser’s post-trial motion. Nemeth, she wrote, “did not change or heighten the requirements for establishing causation,” and the estate’s proof was “grounded in historical industrial hygiene data” and in Seen’s testimony about his actual contact with Kaiser’s joint compound.
She found that Dr. Jacqueline Moline “satisfied the applicable causation standard by relying on studies reporting actual measurements” taken during drywall and joint-compound work. Dr. Moline had estimated numerical exposure levels for the tasks Seen described, drawing on the report of the industrial hygienist Steven Paskal, whose estimates matched the historical data. Other studies showed elevated rates of mesothelioma among drywall workers with exposures like Seen’s, and his exposures exceeded the levels those studies associated with the disease. Kaiser appealed; Jared Hausmann, a partner in Simmons Hanly Conroy’s office in Alton, Illinois, was on the firm’s appellate team.
Fifty-Pound Bags of Talc
Daniel Rugg worked for about thirty years as a maintenance worker at a Washington Penn Plastic Co. plant in Pennsylvania, where he emptied fifty-pound bags of industrial talc into large storage hoppers. He developed symptoms in 2018, was diagnosed with mesothelioma in the spring of 2019 and died in 2021, at 64.
His estate and his widow, Sandra Rugg, took the company to trial before Judge Glynnis D. Hill of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. Over three weeks, experts testified that the plant’s talc contained asbestos, and testimony showed that the company had received testing documents showing asbestos in its talc, had not shared them with its workers, had known of asbestos’s dangers since the 1960s and had never warned employees or required masks or respirators. On July 14, 2022, after a day of deliberation, the jury found that Washington Penn had failed to provide a reasonably safe workplace and awarded $1.4 million to the estate, $1.65 million in wrongful-death damages and $750,000 to Sandra Rugg for loss of consortium, $3.8 million in all. “This lawsuit was never about the money,” she said.
Hausmann was among the Simmons Hanly Conroy lawyers representing the family, with James M. Kramer and Donald P. Blydenburgh, who tried the case, and Randy S. Cohn and Todd Gampp. After the verdict he briefed and argued the opposition to Washington Penn’s motion to set it aside. The court denied the motion; Washington Penn appealed to the Superior Court and, on January 18, 2023, withdrew the appeal.
Kaiser’s Appeal
Hausmann graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Illinois University in 2010 and magna cum laude from Saint Louis University School of Law in 2014, was a law clerk in the Staff Attorney’s Office of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit before joining Simmons Hanly Conroy, and has written for the amicus committee of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association.
On May 21, 2024, the Appellate Division, First Department, in a decision by Justices Manzanet-Daniels, Kapnick, González and Pitt-Burke, held that admitting Seen’s videotaped testimony was “a provident exercise of the trial court’s discretion,” because Kaiser had deposed him after joining the case and had “a full opportunity to cross-examine him.” His testimony that he had worked with dry-mix joint compound in bags marked “Kaiser,” together with the company’s documents on its asbestos-containing formulas, was sufficient evidence of his exposure to Kaiser’s products. Evidence that the joint compound was contaminated by asbestos from industrial talc was properly admitted, because the estate’s expert exchange had “specifically stated that there would be testimony about asbestos contaminated talc.” The experts, the court wrote, had “calculated Seen’s total exposure and opined that Kaiser’s products were a proximate cause of his mesothelioma.”
