Leslie-Anne Taylor
Mesothelioma, Asbestos-Contaminated Talc, Product Liability, and Consumer Claims
It has been an absolute honor to represent the Lovell family, who showed incredible courage throughout this trial.
Every Exhibit Admitted
Paul and Kathryn Lovell of Melrose, Massachusetts, have been married for more than four decades and raised four children. For most of those years, a white bottle of Johnson's Baby Powder sat in their home. Paul, sixty-nine by the time of trial, used it on himself and on his children, trusting it was exactly what it appeared to be: the gentlest product in the house.
On July 29, 2025, after a two-week trial in Middlesex County Superior Court, a jury awarded the Lovells $42,608,300 against Johnson & Johnson. Leslie-Anne Taylor of Thornton Law Firm tried the case with her partner Andrea Marino Landry, alongside Aaron Chapman and Danny Kraft of Dean Omar Branham Shirley, Amy Carter of Carter Law Group, and other members of the plaintiffs' team.
Taylor's assignment inside that team was the one on which every other assignment depended: the documents. A case spanning decades of product history lives or dies on whether its records reach the jury, and Taylor organized the plaintiffs' exhibits, built the foundations, and got them into evidence. The court admitted every document she presented during the trial. Not most of them — every one.
Household Use and Product Identification
The Lovells' case had a feature that made it harder, and ultimately more important, than most: Paul identified no workplace source of asbestos exposure. No shipyard, no factory, no insulation job. The exposure the case alleged came from decades of ordinary household use of a product marketed for babies.
That framing put the entire burden on the connected record. The team had to identify the powder and its talc across a long product history, combining household-use testimony with historical formulas, mine records, corporate files, and laboratory testing of the talc itself. They had to explain how repeated, ordinary use created an inhalation pathway. And they had to connect that pathway to Paul's mesothelioma. With no workplace source to point to, the household-use history, the product records, the source-mine evidence, and the reliability of the competing tests carried everything.
Historical Talc and Competing Tests
The scientific fight came down to what the instruments could see. Plaintiffs' expert Alice Blount testified that she found asbestiform material in Johnson & Johnson talc, and William Longo testified that more than half of the Baby Powder bottles he tested contained asbestos. Mark Bailey then explained the key methodological point: transmission electron microscopy can identify asbestiform structures at a scale and sensitivity unavailable through X-ray diffraction alone.
That sensitivity gap became the plaintiffs' answer to decades of historical "none detected" results. At trace concentrations, a non-detect could reflect the instrument's detection limit rather than the absence of asbestos fibers — the test wasn't proving the powder clean; it was proving itself blind. The jury also heard competing evidence about sample selection, testing methods, instrument sensitivity, morphology, counting rules, and mineral classification, giving jurors a concrete basis for evaluating what the historical tests could actually detect and how the observed structures were classified.
The Gene-Fusion Theory and Causation
Johnson & Johnson argued that a rare gene fusion — not asbestos — caused Paul's mesothelioma. Occupational-medicine expert Steven Haber rejected the theory as speculative and unsupported by epidemiological evidence, and connected the disease to the alleged inhalation of asbestos-containing Baby Powder.
The plaintiffs therefore had to do two things at once: answer the alternative-cause theory, and satisfy Massachusetts toxic-tort causation by proving the pathway from talc to airborne fiber and establishing asbestos exposure as a substantial contributing factor despite the proposed genetic mechanism. The jury accepted the plaintiffs' account.
Corporate Evidence and Liability Findings
The most powerful witnesses in the case may have been the company's own files. The plaintiffs presented internal records concerning talc sources, testing, contamination, safer alternatives, product design, warnings, consumer assurances, and communications with regulators — and Taylor and the trial team linked each record to the product-use testimony and the scientific and medical evidence.
Each document required a witness or other foundation and a connection to a disputed element. The trial sequence tied historical testing memoranda and company communications to the mineral evidence, the product used in the Lovells' home, and the warning the Lovells said they never received. Trial-technology specialists Ryan Travis and Jermell Valkema supported the courtroom presentation of a documentary record extending across decades.
The jury found Johnson & Johnson liable for negligence, breach of warranty, defective design, and failure to warn — findings that addressed the company's testing and risk evaluation, the product's design and fitness for ordinary use, the adequacy of its warnings, and causation, all measured against the same connected record.
The $42,608,300 Verdict
The award recognized both of the people the disease had reached. Paul received $15 million for past pain, $9 million for future pain, $608,300 for past medical expenses, and $2 million for future medical expenses. Kathryn received $5 million for past loss of consortium and $11 million for future loss of consortium — a jury's acknowledgment of mesothelioma’s effects on their marriage. Johnson & Johnson announced an appeal.
Taylor called it an honor to represent the Lovells, a family that showed remarkable courage throughout the trial.
A Career Built at Thornton
Taylor's path to that courtroom is its own Thornton story. She joined the firm — founded in 1978 by Michael Thornton and colleagues doing pioneering work for victims of mesothelioma and other asbestos diseases — in 2005, as a paralegal. She earned her bachelor's degree from Northeastern University, magna cum laude, in 2006 while working at the firm, then graduated summa cum laude from Suffolk University Law School in 2013. She returned in every capacity the firm could offer: paralegal, of counsel, associate, and finally partner.
She entered the Massachusetts bar in 2013 and the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts in 2016. Her practice includes mesothelioma and asbestos claims, product liability, personal injury, and consumer class actions.
By the Lovell trial, Taylor had spent two decades at Thornton — more time inside asbestos litigation than many lawyers spend in practice. When the moment came to move a documentary record spanning half a century into evidence without losing a single exhibit, she had been preparing for it, in one role or another, her entire professional life.