Jessica M. Dean

In January 2015 Jerry “Doy” Coogan went to a doctor about a belly that had been swelling for a month. He was sixty-seven, lived in Kettle Falls, Washington, and was still working full time in the excavation business he ran, where for decades he had maintained and operated the cranes, backhoes and other heavy equipment himself; he had worked with backhoes and cranes from a young age, had learned to run an excavator from his grandmother, restored hot rods as a hobby, and bought his brakes, clutches, gaskets and other replacement parts at the local NAPA store, Rayloc brakes among them, remanufactured by Genuine Parts Company and sold under the NAPA name. In April 2015 he was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma and began chemotherapy at the end of the month. Tumors developed in his abdomen, diaphragm and both lungs. Doctors drained fluid from his abdomen every week, and he made the two-hour drive to Spokane to have it done; later a catheter was placed in his chest to drain his lungs every day. The tumors obstructed his bowels, and anorexia and malnutrition followed, then open wounds, collapsed lungs and, when he could no longer take in fluids, kidney failure. He died on July 1, 2015, six months after he first sought medical attention. His daughter Roxana later testified that he never let his family see him in pain. “I know he knew he was going to die,” she said.

His widow, Gerri Sue Coogan, his daughters Roxana and Raquel and his estate sued Genuine Parts, NAPA and other companies in Pierce County Superior Court in June 2015. Jessica M. Dean and Ben Adams of Dean Omar Branham Shirley tried the case in Tacoma over twelve weeks in early 2017, putting in the product history of the asbestos friction parts, the exposure, the medical causation and the losses to his wife and daughters. Dean said afterward that Coogan “had no idea that he was being exposed to deadly asbestos from just doing what he enjoyed,” and that the sellers of friction parts had known for close to a century that their products contained asbestos and could kill and still “refuse to acknowledge their responsibility.” In closing argument on April 13, 2017, counsel asked the jurors for $30 million for Coogan’s pain and suffering; the defense argued liability and offered no figure of its own. The jury deliberated about five hours and returned a unanimous verdict against Genuine Parts and NAPA on negligence and strict liability: $81.5 million, itemized as $30 million for Coogan’s pain and suffering, $30 million for his widow’s loss of consortium, $20 million for his daughters’ loss of consortium and $1.5 million for the household services he would have provided.

Dr. Schuster’s Five Years

Genuine Parts and NAPA had offered Dr. Gary Schuster, an internist, to testify that Coogan had stage 3 cirrhosis and about five years to live rather than the roughly fifteen the actuarial tables gave a man his age, an opinion aimed at the consortium and services claims. It rested on the fluid in Coogan’s abdomen, and Coogan’s physicians attributed that fluid to the mesothelioma; Dr. Schuster admitted he could not say what share of it, if any, came from cirrhosis. The trial court excluded the testimony under Evidence Rule 702 as speculative and, in the alternative, under Rule 403, because the prejudice of characterizing Coogan to the jury as an alcoholic outweighed whatever the opinion was worth. The defendants moved after the verdict for a new trial or a reduction, and the trial court denied the motions at a hearing on December 1, 2017.

Division Two of the Court of Appeals decided the appeal in an unpublished opinion by Chief Judge Maxa on February 19, 2020, amended on April 7. It left the liability findings standing, held that Dr. Schuster should have been allowed to testify and on that ground set aside the consortium and services awards, and found the $30 million for pain and suffering so large that it shocked the court’s conscience; “this is the rare case where we must disregard the jury’s verdict,” the majority wrote, and it ordered a new trial on damages. Judge Melnick dissented from the damages ruling. The majority, he wrote, “does not give deference to the jury that the parties selected to hear this case”; “[n]o amount of money could ever compensate Doy for the suffering he endured”; and “[t]he verdict for these noneconomic damages does not shock my conscience.” The defense, he noted, had “solely argued about liability, and that they had none.”

July 8, 2021

The Coogans petitioned for review. Lisa Shirley, who heads the firm’s motion and appellate practice, led the appeal on the record Dean and Adams had made, with Dean and Adams on the briefs alongside Seattle counsel from Weinstein Caggiano and Schroeter Goldmark & Bender. On July 8, 2021 the Washington Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Stephens for a unanimous court, reversed the Court of Appeals and reinstated the verdict in full. “Trial by jury is the bedrock of our justice system,” the court began. The exclusion of Dr. Schuster had been within the trial court’s discretion: the opinion had no sufficient factual basis once its author conceded he could not separate the cirrhosis from the cancer, and “Such speculative evidence is of little help to the jury.” With that ruling restored, the consortium and services awards stood.

On the size of the award the court held that the Court of Appeals had “overstepped its limited role and inappropriately substituted its own judgment” for that of the trial court and the jury. “We strongly presume the jury’s verdict is correct,” the justices wrote, and “The verdict of a jury does not carry its own death warrant solely by reason of its size.” The passion-or-prejudice inquiry and the shocks-the-conscience inquiry ask essentially the same question, whether some improper influence drove the verdict, and nothing in the record unmistakably showed one. Appellate judges, the court said, quoting an earlier decision, “can review only the written record, while the factfinder and the trial judge [a]re in the favored position” to weigh the evidence; the amount of damages is an ultimate fact for the jury, and “There is no legal standard for determining the length of suffering needed to support significant damages.” Of the intermediate court’s reaction to $30 million for the last six months of Coogan’s life the court wrote one sentence: “Our conscience is apparently more resilient than the Court of Appeals to shocks.” With postjudgment interest the judgment exceeded $95 million. The same twelve-week record had served the jurors who found liability and damages, the trial judge whose rulings on Dr. Schuster rested on the expert’s own concessions, and the appellate judges who read it years later without seeing a witness. Dean said she was “grateful the court respected the decision of the jury,” who had given months of their lives to the case, and that “The message from the Supreme Court is that we trust juries to do their jobs.”

Charles and the First Archive

Dean began her career in Dallas in 2003 representing people injured in nursing homes and hospitals and workers who had not been paid for their work. After three years she looked for another job, and Trey Branham interviewed her. He gave her books and articles showing that companies had known for decades that asbestos caused disease, and soon after she took on her first asbestos case. The client was Charles, a sixty-two-year-old sign maker who as a young man had repaired equipment at a naval shipyard, where the gaskets and packing he handled released asbestos around work he had no reason to think dangerous. He had retired by the time Dean met him but still made signs for his church when his health allowed. During the case he lost weight, went through chemotherapy, entered two drug trials and lived on constant pain medication while her team traced products, equipment, work areas, testing and company knowledge. The case was finished before he died, but only just.

The companies had generated the specifications, sales records, internal memoranda, test results and industrial-hygiene files; the man who breathed the dust generated none of the documents later needed to prove what had entered his lungs, so the breathing conditions of an ordinary workday had to be rebuilt from an archive organized around products and commerce rather than the person doing the labor. The investigation took months and years; his remaining life did not. She has described the lawyer she wants to be as one who “always seeks justice, helps people when they need it the most,” and the work as using the courts “to enforce rules that are broken,” the rules written to prevent serious harm, in a community where the law is the last resort and most cases end in a resolution that gives a family some peace.

Avon’s Memos, 1971 to 1973

Rita-Ann Chapman began using Avon talcum powder in 1954, when she was eight years old and growing up in Los Angeles. She used the loose body and face powders several times a week until 1978 and again from 1995 to 2010; she worked as a human-relations specialist for Sears, and she and her husband, Gary, retired to Scottsdale, Arizona. Gary Chapman had worked at a Hyster plant that made forklifts, handling asbestos brakes, clutches and gaskets, and she washed his work clothes. In 2021 she was diagnosed with mesothelioma, and the Chapmans sued Avon Products, Hyster-Yale Group and others in the Los Angeles Superior Court. Dean, Adams and Rachel Gross tried the case before Judge Lawrence P. Riff over about three months in 2022. Like nearly anyone who has used a household product for half a century, Chapman had kept none of the containers, so the proof could not rest on testing the powder she had shaken on as a child.

Dean’s team built the exposure and causation case from Avon’s own files and from the mines. In an October 1971 memorandum Avon acknowledged that “there is always a strong possibility that asbestos may be found in any given talc deposit”; in December 1971 it recommended that certain talcs be dropped, writing that “we recommend that their use in any Avon product be discontinued immediately”; in November 1972 it wrote that “samples of each of our current talcs will contain asbestos forms, particularly tremolite”; in December 1972 it concluded that removing the tremolite was not feasible; and a September 1973 memorandum reported that Avon’s historical testing of Italian, Alabama, North Carolina and Montana talc had detected asbestos at 0.1 to 2 percent. The jury also heard that Avon had kept selling four talc products its testing had found to contain high levels of asbestos for 103 days, to exhaust its stock, while Chapman was using them. Dr. William Longo, a materials scientist, had tested more than ninety samples of Italian talc from vintage containers and found amphibole asbestos in over 77 percent of them, and with an earlier method he had detected chrysotile in most of the Avon talc products he had been able to test; his laboratory concentrated the fibers by heavy-liquid density separation before examining them under polarized light microscopy, a technique refined from one first used at the Colorado School of Mines. Dr. Steven Haber, a pulmonologist, testified that Avon’s powder was a substantial factor in her disease and read the company’s testing against its detection limits: “you have to have an understanding of what the limitations of detection are so that you can have an understanding of what the results mean.” Dr. Arnold Brody, a biologist, testified that all six asbestos types cause disease and that there is no safe level above background, and Dr. David Madigan, a biostatistician, built on Longo’s Italian results and a study of Vermont talc workers. Avon’s expert, Dr. Alan Segrave, tested samples from Val Chisone in Italy, North Carolina, Montana and Guangxi in China and found no asbestos.

In December 2022 the jury found Avon liable for strict-liability failure to warn, manufacturing and design defects, negligence, fraudulent misrepresentation and fraudulent concealment, found that it had acted with malice, oppression or fraud, and apportioned 90 percent of the fault to Avon and 10 percent to Hyster. It awarded $40,831,453 in compensatory damages, $40 million of it noneconomic, $32.8 million to Rita-Ann Chapman and $8 million to her husband, and in the punitive phase $10.3 million against Avon and $1 million against Hyster, $52.1 million in all. Dean said the jurors had been asked “to find a number that meant something to Avon.” It was the first talc case Avon had lost at trial in the United States. Adams said that “Rita and her mother relied on a belief that Avon’s products were safe to use” and that Chapman “had no reason to even think they might cause cancer.”

Published on March 4, 2026

Rita-Ann Chapman died on March 16, 2025, a little more than two years after the verdict, and Gary Chapman continued the case as her successor in interest. Avon, represented by Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and Foley Mansfield, appealed on four grounds: that Longo’s chrysotile testimony should have been excluded under Kelly and Sargon, that the trial court had wrongly barred Lisa Gallo, its designated corporate witness, that Haber should not have been allowed to testify about testing methods and Avon’s documents, and that the evidence of causation was insufficient. Dean joined Shirley and Adams as counsel for the Chapmans on appeal.

On February 11, 2026 the Court of Appeal, Second District, Division Eight, affirmed in an opinion by Presiding Justice Stratton, joined by Justices Wiley and Viramontes. The trial court had found that it “cannot say that Dr. Longo’s expert opinion is clearly invalid and unreliable” and that the studies he relied on adequately supported his conclusions; the appellate court held that Avon had never made a Kelly challenge below and had waived one, that “The goal of trial court gatekeeping is simply to exclude ‘clearly invalid and unreliable’ expert opinion,” and that “Avon simply presented different expert opinions, which the jury did not accept.” Avon argued that the “tremolite” in its 1972 memorandum meant a non-asbestos form of the mineral; the court found “the logical inference from the document to be that ‘tremolite’ referred to tremolite asbestos.” Gallo had joined Avon in 1994 and had conceded at her deposition that she had no personal knowledge of the company’s talc in the 1960s and 1970s, when Chapman used it most; the court held that designation as a person most qualified creates no category of trial witness and that “Avon put itself in a position where it had no corporate representative to testify from firsthand knowledge.” Avon also complained of what counsel had said about that in closing; the court answered that “Counsel’s comments were fair comment on the state of the evidence,” and quoted the trial judge: “If that is a problem, it is Avon’s problem.” On sufficiency, “Avon has not come close to meeting even the minimal requirement” of setting out the evidence against it, and the claim was waived. The court awarded the Chapmans their costs on appeal, and on March 4, 2026 it certified the opinion for publication.

Dean said afterward: “Companies cannot ignore science, disregard their own internal warnings and put profits over people’s health without being held accountable.” “Avon was aware of asbestos concerns in talc dating back to the 1970s and was involved in industry testing,” she said, “yet it never warned consumers.” “The evidence at trial showed that for decades Avon knew its talc was contaminated.”

Chenango One and Chenango Two

Theresa Garcia of Chicago used Johnson’s Baby Powder for nearly five decades, on herself and, after she became a mother of six, on her children and later her grandchildren. She was diagnosed with mesothelioma in January 2020 at fifty-two and died that July. Her daughter Stephanie Salcedo carried the case forward as administrator of the estate in the Circuit Court of Cook County, before Judge Patrick J. Sherlock. Between the diagnosis and the trial the defendant changed shape. Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc., the subsidiary that had made the powder, merged into Chenango Zero LLC, a Texas company, which then divided in two: Chenango One, renamed LTL Management and organized in New Jersey, took the talc liabilities and filed for Chapter 11; Chenango Two, renamed Johnson & Johnson Holdco (NA), Inc., took the assets. The bankruptcy court refused to dismiss LTL’s petition, the Third Circuit reversed, LTL filed again, the bankruptcy court dismissed the second case and the Third Circuit affirmed on July 25, 2024; the two filings stayed Garcia’s case and thousands of others for years. Johnson & Johnson then spun its consumer health brands, baby powder among them, into Kenvue Inc. Most of the consumer health employees and management moved to Kenvue, which made the powder at the same plant, and its chief executive, Thibaut Mongon, testified by video deposition that “the manufacture and marketing of Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder remained unchanged after the spinoff.” Johnson & Johnson had stopped selling talc-based powder in the United States and Canada in 2020; Kenvue kept selling it abroad, and “U.S. consumers could purchase talc-based Johnson’s baby powder in some stores and online as late as 2023.”

Dean tried the case over four weeks in April 2024 with Adams, Mark Buha and Christian Luciano Santiago of Vogelzang Law. Mark Bailey, a geologist, testified that the talc Johnson & Johnson sourced from Italy and Vermont contained asbestos fibers, and laboratory testing presented at trial found asbestos in some samples of Johnson’s Baby Powder. Bailey had tested the powder himself under a confidentiality agreement, and the parties had agreed before trial that he would say nothing about those tests unless Johnson & Johnson opened the door. In its opening statement the company’s counsel called him the “testing guy” who would not tell the jury what he had found, and on cross-examination asked whether he had tested the powder; he answered that he had, that the agreement “has been released,” and that he would answer if asked. The trial court denied the company’s motion for a mistrial, finding that Johnson & Johnson had “interjected” the testing into the case. The company called Dr. Ed Kuffner, its chief medical officer for consumer health since 2017, as a corporate representative; the court barred him from testifying to events before his employment, for want of personal knowledge, and from offering the opinion that the powder was asbestos-free or safe, because he had never been disclosed as an expert. Dr. Steven Haber testified again on causation and on mineralogy and testing methods.

The jury awarded $45 million: $12 million under the Wrongful Death Act for Garcia’s six children and $33 million under the Survival Act, $30 million for the years mesothelioma took from her life and $3 million for her pain, suffering, emotional distress, disfigurement and loss of normal life. It allocated 15 percent of the responsibility to Johnson & Johnson, 15 percent to Holdco, 70 percent to Kenvue and none to LTL, with special findings that Holdco and Kenvue were successors because they were mere continuations of the old consumer company and marketed goods in the same product line, the first verdict to reach the spinoff. Dean said that “After years of delay caused by Johnson & Johnson’s bad faith abuse of the bankruptcy system,” the jury had seen through the three companies’ deceptions, and that “The defendants knew that talc contains asbestos impurities that were mined and put in the bottles of baby powder J&J sold.” Adams said Johnson & Johnson had “engaged in a corporate shell game creating Kenvue, Inc.” during “two bad faith bankruptcies in an attempt to avoid the decades of liability it now faces.” Judge Sherlock denied the defendants’ motions for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, a new trial or a remittitur, and added $2,657,835.92 in prejudgment interest under section 2-1303(c) of the Code of Civil Procedure.

The Injury She Experienced Before Death

Johnson & Johnson, Holdco and Kenvue appealed. Shirley, Rebecca Cucu and Lina Chagoya handled the appeal for the firm with Santiago and with David L. Franklin and Christopher M. Walling of Massey & Gail in Chicago. On July 10, 2026 the Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, Sixth Division, affirmed in a published opinion by Justice Hyman, with Justice Pucinski concurring. On the $30 million for lost years the companies argued that a shortened life expectancy is a future harm recoverable only by a living plaintiff. The court answered that “The injury at issue is not Garcia’s death itself but the injury she experienced before death.” Mesothelioma had drastically shortened her life while she lived; “Garcia experienced and sued for that injury before her death,” “Garcia’s reduced lifespan was caused and known before her death,” and “So her death did not create the injury; mesothelioma did.” “The Survival Act preserves the decedent’s existing claims; it does not create new ones,” the court wrote, and nothing in the earlier Illinois cases conditioned recovery on the plaintiff surviving to judgment. Damages for the years a disease takes from a life now rest, under the Survival Act, on a published Illinois appellate opinion.

On successor liability the companies argued for Texas law, under which a successor is liable only if it expressly assumes the debt, because the merging entities had been Texas companies and the merger agreement chose Texas law. The court applied section 302 of the Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws, under which the state of incorporation governs unless another state has a more significant relationship, and found that apart from the “short-lived Texas entities (Chenango One and Two) created solely for restructuring” the defendants had no meaningful tie to Texas: Holdco is a New Jersey corporation and Kenvue a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in New Jersey. Under New Jersey law a successor that acquires substantially all of a manufacturer’s assets and continues the product line may be liable, under Ramirez v. Amsted Industries, and so may a mere continuation, measured by continuity of management, personnel, facilities, assets and operations. The old consumer company “no longer exists,” the court observed, so the jury could consider its successors; Kenvue had kept selling talc powder abroad and marketed cornstarch powder under the Johnson’s name, and the evidence showed continuity of management, employees, facilities and operations. “The restructuring did not materially change how the baby powder business operated.” On the interest statute the court held that prejudgment interest “constitutes a ministerial function akin to the awarding of costs” and leaves the jury’s role untouched, and it upheld the denial of judgment notwithstanding the verdict and of a new trial. Shirley said afterward that “The appellate court carefully considered each of Johnson & Johnson’s arguments and affirmed the judgment in its entirety,” and Trey Branham that “jury findings in these asbestos cases will be upheld when they are supported by the evidence and the law.”

Every Day of Her Life

Cherie Craft founded Smart from the Start, a nonprofit that runs trauma-informed community programs for children and families, and serves as its chief executive and executive director. She had used Johnson’s Baby Powder every day for more than forty years when, in January 2024, she was diagnosed with malignant peritoneal mesothelioma. Her case was tried in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City as part of the Baltimore City Asbestos Litigation, Craft v. Ahold Delhaize US Inc., No. 24-X-000005, by Dean with Kathy Farinas and Venus Burns of her firm and Daniel Brown and Matthew Kiely of Brown Kiely. The evidence covered her decades of use, the sourcing of the talc and the testing of it for asbestos, medical causation, the warnings the products carried and the information the companies gave, or kept from, consumers and regulators, including internal Johnson & Johnson documents from the early 1970s that Craft’s team said showed executives knew of asbestos in the talc and told neither.

On December 22, 2025 the jury found Johnson & Johnson, two of its subsidiaries and Kenvue liable for failing to warn that the powder contained asbestos, found fraudulent misrepresentation or concealment, and returned $59.84 million in compensatory damages: $3.54 million for future medical expenses, $2.3 million for past and future lost earnings or earning capacity and $54 million in noneconomic damages. It then awarded $1 billion in punitive damages against Johnson & Johnson and $500 million against Pecos River Talc, a subsidiary the company had set up during its bankruptcy efforts. The court directed entry of the compensatory judgment against Johnson & Johnson, Pecos River Talc, Holdco and Kenvue and of the punitive awards against the two companies the jury had named. Johnson & Johnson said it would bear the whole verdict because it had indemnified Kenvue for baby powder liabilities, and the defendants announced that they would appeal; the company faces more than 67,000 claimants who say its talc products gave them cancer. Dean said: “Cherie Craft runs a non-profit where she pours her life into helping others.” “Her cancer was preventable.” “She used Johnson’s Baby Powder every day of her life until she was diagnosed with cancer,” she said, and “J&J refused to accept any responsibility and fought at every turn.” “We are grateful for the dedication of the jury and court and that J&J was held accountable.”

Eight Children, an IHOP, and a Courtroom

Dean grew up in St. Louis, one of eight children. Her father built airplanes at McDonnell Douglas and often worked more than eighty hours a week; her grandmother sold Avon door to door. At sixteen she took her first job, waitressing at IHOP, and she kept waiting tables through college. She swam and debated, and her debate coach pushed her toward college and the scholarships that made it possible. She earned degrees in economics and political science from Boston University, magna cum laude, and graduated cum laude from the University of Texas School of Law in 2003; she was admitted in Texas that year, in California in 2008 and in Pennsylvania in 2012. After the three years in Dallas nursing-home, hospital and wage cases and the interview with Trey Branham, she joined Amin Omar, Branham and Lisa Shirley in the firm that bears their names, where Shirley heads the motion and appellate practice.

The division of labor between Dean and Shirley runs through the major cases. Dean and Adams tried Coogan; Shirley carried the verdict through the Washington Supreme Court. Dean helped try Chapman and stayed on the appellate team when the California judgment was affirmed. Dean tried Garcia; Shirley, Cucu and Chagoya defended the judgment on appeal. What the appeals have had to work with is what the trials preserved: the rulings admitting and excluding experts, the jury instructions, the evidence of corporate succession, the constitutional objections and the evidentiary basis for each category of damages on the verdict form, laid down before any verdict came in. In 2024 the firm was in back-to-back trials against Johnson & Johnson, and Dean gave an interview that October at her home in Dallas between trips to Boston and Pittsburgh for trials.

Her grandmother’s Avon route and her father’s aircraft work now sit inside a practice spanning consumer talc and industrial asbestos, two settings in which familiar products were carried into homes and workplaces by people who trusted them. Her cases test whether the manufacturers understood those exposures, warned the people using the products and kept the records needed to trace responsibility decades later, and the work runs from product identification through corporate and scientific records, expert foundations and damages evidence to trial and appeal, the chain from exposure to affirmed judgment.

Saying the Name

Before trial Dean listens to a song built around the idea that a person dies again when the last living voice says the name. “One of the hardest parts of this work is meeting families at a moment they never expected to face,” she has said. “You see the birthdays, anniversaries and milestones that were cut short because a company chose not to put safety first.” “Those stories stay with you, and they remind you why accountability matters.” Charles repaired shipyard equipment and made signs for his church. Doy Coogan restored cars and ran excavation machinery. Rita-Ann Chapman began using powder at eight. Theresa Garcia powdered her children and grandchildren. Cherie Craft built an organization for families facing trauma. Of the cases that let people who died because of a company’s conduct be remembered in a courtroom, Dean has said: “A case can live for years.”